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Sunday 22 March 2015

Update on my Business Activities in Eve

The focus of my business activities in Eve is starting to shift.  Below is a summary of what i am doing.

Worth recalling that the aim of my business activities is to spend no more than 45 minutes a weekday on Eve + each activity must be able to generate at least enough ISK to purchase a Plex a month.



Manufacturing

This is working well.  I make up to 15bn ISK per month for what is half an hours work each evening.

I am slowly expanding the set of items i manufacture to sell.  I make good margins here though they are slow moving (just how i like it).

Currently, i sell in the 4 trade Hubs + 4 other regions, though i may scale back in Jita given it is quite competitive.



Trading

This was where i started but i am now winding it down.  The big constraint i now face is that real life (i.e. work) is taking up more and more of my free time whether it be working at home or business travel.

Part of trading is to constantly review what I am selling and filter out the low margin items and find new high margin items to sell - that needs a degree of focus and travelling on business does detract from that!

Hence, for now i will focus on a few highly valued items (i.e. prices over 500m ISK).



Planetary Interaction

In all i made 1.7bn ISK profit from Planetary Interaction.  Mainly hauling P2 materials to my factory planets and selling the resulting P3 materials produced.  Occasionally I would haul P3 items and sell the resulting P4 items.

I am able to make enough a month to finance a Plex whilst spending very little time on it - which is my aim.

This could be a real ISK maker.  So, once i review the set up i suspect i will keep this going.

The margins are about 20% - so pretty healthy.



Plex Trading

I made about 26m ISK through buying and selling 21 Plex until real life caused me to move on.

At this stage i will leave it on the back burner and see if i can get it to work more efficiently at a later stage.

It is a useful business to park surplus ISK into though the margins are very low (1-3% after all costs).


Mining

It has crossed my mind that i do spend about 3 hours a day working from home in the evening and many hours working at home in the weekend.

Therefore, i have decided to start mining and see if i can get this to operate in the background whilst i work.

I plan to get my two alts in Jita (on different accounts) set up for mining and see what i can make with them both out on the job.

At this stage, i am viewing it as playing Eve in the background and making ISK whilst i do.

Back of the envelope calculations suggest that this should achieve the goal of making a Plex a month.  We will see.

(i have to admit, when i watch the video clips of miners, it does look incredibly relaxing!  Could be tricky to weave into trying to work at home in the evening though).



The results

More of this in another post, but in summary my monthly profits vary from 16bn ISK to literally nil.  16bn if i am not on business travel, nil if i am away at lot!

The chart below shows the monthly profit i make since i started back in May 2013.



It can be seen from the above chart that i was on business travel in last August (2014), November and February (renewed my gold cards at BA and Emirates, so can't complain!).  Otherwise i tend to make about 10bn ISK a month.

It is fair to say that my real life work has somewhat dented my progression.  Given my planned business travel in April it is unlikely that i will make 100bn in the 12 months to the end of May - as the chart below shows.

The chart below shows how my wealth has progressed since i started back in May 2013.  The red line shows the average profit per day i make (i.e. the monthly profit divided by the days in the month).


My ultimate goal is to make enough ISK to buy a Plex a day whilst constraining myself to the 45 minutes per week night.

I suspect this is achievable.

Of course, an underlying goal is to enjoy my time in Eve - which is being met.  So good news there.

Sunday 8 March 2015

Eve 101

Continuing on from last week's post on useful quick videos:

I found  this website recently, Eve 101 (actually, i think i heard about it on the Crossing Zebras Podcast given it is part of Crossing Zebras).

It consists of a series of quick 5 to 10 minutes youtube clips going through the basics of Eve Online - so very much aimed at the new player.

So far nothing market related.

But some nice videos nonetheless.

Full list so far:

1. Key Concepts
2. The Pilot
3. The Ship
4. Modules
5. Drones
6. Player Groups
7. The Station Interface
8. The Neocom Menu
9. Ship User Interface