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Monday 1 April 2019

Wealth of 3 billion isk

After 21 days trading my current wealth is 3.0bn ISK (details at the bottom of this post).

The weekend was ok but the bigger news is the transition to a new set of items i am putting up for sale in Dodixie.



As a reminder, my strategy

I buy from Sell Orders in Jita and put these items up as Sell Orders in Dodixie.  I focus on low selling volume items - so there is much less competition and the profit margins are therefore much higher.



The type of item i now sell

21 days ago when i had 10m isk i was buying missile blueprints from Jita for 600k isk and selling them in Dodixie for 2.5m isk.  Great profits, easy isk.  But within 10 days that was not moving the dials anymore - 2m isk profits don't matter when wealth is at 200m isk.

So the idea is always to move up the profit scale: first to buying items for 10m isk that sell for 15m isk, then buying items for 30m isk that sell for 45m isk etc.  As my wealth rises i need to abandon what was good profits only a few days prior and move onto the next big profit series.

Today, i am buying items for 150m isk that sell for 220m isk.

And always making sure that they typically sell no more than 1 item a day.  1 item every 3 days is the ideal target - competition will be low, slow and sleepy.


How i find these items

There are two requirements i want to find in an item to sell:

1) sales volumes of 1 item sold each one to three days
2) high profit margins

That signals low competition and nice steady profits.

An item that sells once every 3 days may not sound great but if you have 30 items up for sale with similar characteristics than you find you will sell around 5-10 a day and then you get the nice steady profits.

At the moment, i scan through the market with my character in Dodixie looking at the volumes sold and i use Eve Marketer to see what the price is in Jita.  I do that every so often and it normally yields a handful of items i can add to my sales list.


The business mechanics

i don't fly around anymore, all my items are couriered from Jita to Dodixie.  I have an alt in Jita doing the buying and setting up the courier contracts.

When it comes to the Courier Contracts, all are Public contracts for now.  For collateral up to 250m i typically offer 5m isk for the courier contract and given the cargo is no more than 40m3 then i find that i often get the items delivered with a few hours.  For collateral nearer 500m isk i offer 7.5m isk.


Skills Trained



Accounting 3 and Broker Relations 3 are there to reduce the fees i pay for putting up Sell Orders and the fees on the actual sale.

Hence, i pay 2.68% Broker Fee to put up a Sell order and 1.4% Sales tax on each sale made.  I.e. 4.08% on all Sales.

To train to Accounting 5 would take me 17 more days and to train to Broker Relations 5 would take me 11 more days.  On the "to do".  I really need to look into how to speed up skill training with cybernetics.  My character is standard with 20 for each attribute.

Trade 5 and Retail 5 means that i can post 65 items for Buy + Sale.  Right now, i have 30 items for Sale and therefore i don't see the need to increase this limit in the next week.

The next step would be to train Wholesale which would increase the limit by 16 a level.

Contracting and Corporation Contracting are just there to allow me to set up contracts though it is my Alt in Jita that does all that - so they are wasted for now.

Marketing - i just misunderstood this skill - it actually allows me to put Sell orders in Stations in the same region if i am docked in another station.  Given i will always sell from one Station in a Region then i have no need of this skill.

For now, i have stopped my skill training on my Dodixie character . . . . . . so that i can start manufacturing training on the alt in Jita.  More on that in another post.



Current wealth is 3.0bn ISK made up from:
  • items for sale 3.6bn ISK
  • less a 20% provision 0.7bn ISK*
  • items in storage for sale 0.0 ISK
  • ISK in wallet 0.1bn ISK
I don't count assets I use in the course of my business such as ships, fittings etc nor do I add back any expenses such as skills purchased etc.  The wealth I disclose is made up of items that are ISK or are in the process of being converted to ISK.

* I take a 20% provision against the items I am selling.  Eve calculates wealth by adding up the value of the sell orders hence it is possible to increase your wealth by buying an item for 100m ISK and putting a sell order for 120m ISK (in this case your wealth would increase by 20m ISK).  For me, I want my wealth to be calculated at cost.  I know that the value of my sell orders will likely fall over time as I update my orders downwards as competition reduces their prices before my items are sold.  Hence the 20% provision is my best guess as to what the maximum reduction I would need to make to my sell orders as a whole before they are sold.  In an ideal world I would value my sell orders at the value which I bought the items for.

4 comments:

  1. I'm really glad I kept a tab on my phone for this blog! Glad to see you've started up again. Your blog inspired me to start doing the same thing 3 years ago, and I've gone from 3 to 350bn since then by essentially emulating you (though I've not been as diligent with blogging!).

    Keep us updated, I'm intrigued how you approach the changes since your hiatus, namely citadels.

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    1. will do, thanks Lormor. and great job on your 350bn!

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  2. > i don't fly around anymore, all my items are couriered from Jita to Dodixie. I have an alt in Jita doing the buying and setting up the courier contracts.

    Seems like that would have been an obvious move, maybe not right at the *very* beginning, but within a week or so of starting? Since you're buying off of sell orders, the buyer doesn't need any skills (except contracting I guess).

    I played station-trading some years ago and got burnt out on it, because I had an excessively high-effort approach. I'm interested that you started this again this year, and planning on reading this blog front to back to get insights on how proceed with getting back into it myself.

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    Replies
    1. good point on the burn out . . . . that reminds me to look for higher value items to post rather than expanding the number of items i have for sale.

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