Wealth is now 9.9bn - see details below. An increase of 2.0bn on last week.
About half the increase came during the week and half at the weekend.
I would hope to be over 10bn at the end of my first full month tomorrow.
Reminder of my aim
With 45 minutes of game time each day, a bit longer at weekends, i aim to run a business that makes good profits after buying enough plex to play the game for free.
Plex
i will plex my account in the second week of June. Hence, i will adopt the strategy of buying 100 Plex each night for 5 nights during the penultimate week of the time period.
Therefore, on Saturday night i bought 100 plex, and again on Sunday and again today on Monday.
Therefore i now own 300 Plex and will buy another 100 on Tuesday and Wednesday to take me to the target 500.
Annoyingly that 2bn ISK will just sit there as Plex earning no return and then be cashed in for 30 days of game time.
I could cut it closer to the deadline but no need to take the risk, i feel.
Bottom line: my business costs need to cover the 2bn plex cost per month.
Second account
Because i will now plex one account, i am starting a second account. He will sit in Amarr as a Seller once i my Dodixie character is filled up. I may be starting him prematurely given there is no sign of my Dodixie character running out of runway to sell product.
Manufacturing alt
I had hoped that this alt would now be manufacturing away but all my isk is being used to meet the demands of my Dodixie alt. Hence, my manufacturing alt in Jita (he currently buys the goods and sets up the courier contracts to transport them to Dodixie) is just training away to manufacture tier 2 items for now.
Once i start to slow down with sell ideas for my Dodixie alt then i will turn to ramping up the manufacturing.
Courier Contracts
I am now having over 1bn isk of items transported from Jita to Dodixie each night.
In many ways, i am the dream ticket for couriers: my cargo requirements are typically below 100m3; my route is all in High Sec; i pay about 1% of the collateral value. Therefore, any pilot with a decent fast ship and suitable docking points merely needs to take the time out of the day to go from Jita to Dodixie and earn a cool 10-20m isk.
Dodixie alt
He is doing all the heavy lifting right now.
He is using 33 of his 65 selling slots to put up 10bn worth of sell orders, indicating an average sell order value of 300m isk. In reality, the spread is from 115m isk to 1.3bn isk sell order value, though with a tail of some at 10m or so - see below. All sell orders will earn me 20% profits before costs (i.e. if i bought something for 80m i need to sell it for 100m. profit = 20m, therefore profit margin is 20/100 = 20%).
Right now, his skills means he pays a 2.68% Broker Fee and a 1.4% Sales Tax for each completed transaction. Add in the 1% courier contract fee and his costs are 5.08%.
Hence, 20% margin get whittled down to 15% once these costs come out.
. . . . . . its like being part of the EU (oooh, did i just let some politics slip in there? . . . . . )
Looking at the items i sell: i am sticking to boosters, implants and blueprints; not so many blueprints these days; i am constantly rotating what i sell - in some weeks certain implants are very profitable and then the profits fall to zero so i focus on a different implant.
I still have some items that have been up for a few weeks now that are just not selling - typically they are on the market for 10m isk or so. Hence, back last month when 10m meant something to me. In a few weeks time i may delist them and sell them back off at cost in Jita just to clear up my order book.
Current wealth is 9.9bn ISK made up from:
- items for sale 10.1bn ISK
- less a 20% provision 2.0bn ISK*
- Plex held (300 Plex) 1.3bn ISK
- items in storage for sale 0.0 ISK
- ISK in wallet 0.5bn 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.
Wealth is now 7.9bn - see details below. An increase of 1.9bn on last week.
A disappointing week really. Well, actually quite a good week but a poor weekend. Sold almost nothing over Easter. All the sales made in the normal quiet weekday periods. Coming into the Easter weekend i honestly thought i would be en-route to 10bn isk wealth. But it was not to be.
Now, i am worrying a bit that i may be loaded up with sell orders that really are slow, too slow. But lets see. If they come through then i will be doing well.
I am now regularly having over 1bn isk of product couriered from Jita to Dodixie. That indicates that i am making 1bn isk of sales per day. So, assuming i am sticking to my 20% margin then i profits are about 200m isk per day pre costs (broker fees, sales tax, courier fees). That comes to about 6bn isk per month pre-costs. We will see how that compares to reality by the end of April.
Couriers - i pay about 1% of the collateral as a fee.
Costs: so, my costs are 2.68% Broker Fee + 1.4% Sales Tax + 1% Courier Fee = 5.08% total costs. That would take my monthly profits down from 6bn isk to 4.5bn isk.
I fully hope to plex my account this month and therefore start a new account. If i use 2bnisk to plex the account then i am left with 2.5bn each month.
Feels like i need to sell more daily or increase my profit margins. I am hoping as i post more items to sell then the daily revenues will rise. We will see about the margins.
Manufacturing alt
in the end, i did not make any trial runs over Easter. Built the spreadsheet though. Live prices coming in via an API. Could not find a table that showed me the raw material content of the items i wanted to manufacture myself - so had to type that all in manually. That hurt.
Right now, the manufacturing alt in Jita (which also does the buying of the items to send to Dodixie) is skilling up to manufacture T2 items. Seems that is where the big money is to be made.
Current wealth is 7.9bn ISK made up from:
- items for sale 9.1bn ISK
- less a 20% provision 1.8bn ISK*
- items in storage for sale 0.0 ISK
- ISK in wallet 0.6bn 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.
My wealth rose to 6.0bn isk after just over 1 month of playing.
Almost all of that is invested on the market in Dodixie - if it all sold now it would generate 7.4bn isk. But i am a cautious man so i estimate that maybe i will take a 20% haircut before they are all sold (if i am honest, that rarely happens).
Strategy . . . . unchanged
Of course, i will say this until i am blue in the face but my strategy remains unchanged: I buy from Sell Orders in Jita and put these items up as Sell Orders in Dodixie. I focus on selling low volume items - so there is much less competition and the profit margins are therefore much higher. If an item sells once every three days then i tend to find the profits are much greater and the competition much less.
Courier Contracts the transport method of choice
I no longer undock - all my items are couriered from Jita to Dodixie. Today was a record where i contracted for 1.8bn isk of items to be couriered. So far, i am sticking to public contracts and for the above 1.8bn courier contract i offered 15m isk and it was delivered within 2 hours. Getting the items from Jita to Dodixie with speed is the key here. Nothing sells until it is posted on the market.
When i look at the contracts on the public market i always find that i am offering the most attractive rates. The cargo space required to transport my items is often less than 10m3 so any half decent pilot in a fast ship taking suitable precautions / kitted out can make an easy few million from me. That is all fine with me.
Headwinds to wealth generation
The main constraint to increasing my wealth is the amount if ISK i have to invest.
Right now, i have 35 orders on raging from old items i put up in the first week waiting to sell for 2m isk to new items i am waiting to sell for 780m isk, the average value if the items for sale is 250m isk.
I focus mainly on blueprints, implants and boosters for now. These are small (low cargo space), high value items that can be slow sellers and so have low competition.
Skills trained
I have not changed the skills on my selling character in Dodixie:
Broker Relations 3 = i pay 2.68% broker fee to post a sell order
Accounting 3 = i pay 1.4% sales tax when an item is sold
Trade 5 + Retail 5 = i can post 65 Sell + Buy orders
Marketing 2 = i have no idea why i trained this . . . .
Contracting 4 = meant i could train Corporation Contracting
Corporation Contracting 2 = i can set up to 30 contracts on behalf of my Corporation. It is the Corporation that sets up the Courier contracts and holds all my isk . . . . . i do this to reduce the number of key presses and logging on/off needed
Jita alt skilling my to Manufacture
This alt a few hours from being able to start to Manufacture the items i want. But given all my isk is being tied up on the market then that is fine with me.
I will need to spend isk on blueprints and materials to get this going.
I am hoping to do a few trial runs over Easter to see how it goes.
Stay tuned.
Plex the account?
That is an aim for this month - to plex this account and therefore perhaps start another account to pay for. That does not come cheap though at 2bn isk. A far cry from the 500m isk when i first did this 5 years ago!
. . . . . you want to hear something sad? I was updating orders at 37000 feet when flying on business two Saturday nights ago!
Current wealth is 6.0bn ISK made up from:
- items for sale 7.4bn ISK
- less a 20% provision 1.5bn 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.
After 28 days trading my current wealth is 4.6bn ISK (details at the bottom of this post).
The weekend was good. I am now starting to find almost 1bn isk in my wallet when i log in.
No change in 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.
I transport the items from Jita to Dodixie using courier contracts. i pay 7.5m for 500m collateral and 10m for 1bn collateral. Also, the cargo space required is typically 5m only. When i look at other courier contracts on the market - i am paying generous fees but i value speed above saving a few million isk on a courier contract. Hence, i find that the items are couriered to me within a few hours.
As my wealth rises i am focusing on higher value items. I don't want to be making 2m isk profits when my wealth is 4.6bn.
Hence, today i am selling items worth over 100m isk for the higher of a minimum of 30m isk profit or 20% profit.
So, as the smaller items sell i am not replacing them with new sell orders any more.
This is a big difference to a few years ago when i first started out - back then i was continuing to sell these low value / steady profit items. But today, i am being more ruthless and abandoning them as their profit stream no longer moves the dials on my wealth.
Will i be able to plex the account?
No, not this month. I would need to liquidate 2bn isk in the next 2 days. Perhaps that is possible but would leave me with 2.6bn isk left on the market. Not ideal. Hence, for now, i will pay another month's subs.
Skills Trained
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.
Hence, for my trading character in Dodixie there is no change on last week - where i went through the skills in more detail:
Current wealth is 4.6bn ISK made up from:
- items for sale 5.4bn ISK
- less a 20% provision 1.1bn ISK*
- items in storage for sale 0.0 ISK
- ISK in wallet 0.3bn 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.
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.
