As at the end of June 2023 my wealth is 1.12 trillion ISK after paying 6.7bn to upgrade to Omega for another 30 days for four accounts. My Wealth increased by 56bn in June.
Technically, my wealth is 1.400 trillion ISK but i always take a 20% provision against Sell Orders to be conservative. Hence i quote 1.12 trillion.
A slower month in June. I did spend 12bn on bits and bobs discussed below - so excluding all that i would have increased my wealth by 67bn. But, times are a changing and the pure pursuit of watching numbers go up is important, but less so.
The Next Chapter
OK, in the last 12 months my wealth rose by 711bn. That would suggest around 15-18 months to generate the next 1 trillion isk But life is too short, there needs to be other aims in life.
1 trillion was always the aim. The question i am asking myself is what to do now?
One dream is to increase my wealth by more than 100bn in a month. I think that can be done this winter but is a big push for the summer months.
Now, family life is busy. 2 children who don't make time for the finer points of being an Eve Trillionaire. A wife who just confiscated my entire hoard of Coke Zeros because they potentially contain some harmful substance.
So, what can i do:
I want to major in manufacturing - if i can find some cookie cutter way here, that would be ideal.
I want to see if i can get invention to work - but i hate the Contract Market System.
And if i can find some other ISK making venture that does not take too much time that would be great.
Oz Tank
Now, i have been following Oz since the dawn of time and is one of my go to Eve Market information sources.
Oz already does a weekly twitch show talking Eve Markets but is planning to expand into hosting show that gives ISK to content providers / other Eve businesses.
A post is coming on this next. But i can see my monthly profits going here.
Quick Summary of June
A slower month vs May but still a better month than i expected. In the top 5 and the best in a summer month.
Sales down 8% to 382bn.
Profits down 2%. So the item margin rose to 28% (profit on sale before all taxes and costs divided by sales). So, nicely ahead of the 25% target i set myself.
No records in any regions except for Sobaseki, more in that debacle next - the whole war dec'g on structures in High Sec.
In the last 12 months i have made sales of 4.2 trillion isk and profits (after everything including Plex) of 711bn isk having spent 82bn on Plex.
I need to adjust my aims
The orginal overall aim of what i do is to increase my wealth by at least 10bn per month. And this had been the aim in prior periods when i used to play Eve.
But i have now achieved this in 27 / 34 months - and i am pretty confident that this is achievable going forwards.
So, lets drop this target. It was great at first but now blends into the general environment and is expected.
My next dream was to make 1bn profits after everything a day. I have now achieved that for the last 12 months. Can i call this a foregone conclusion? Perhaps so. But lets keep this as the base line from here.
For the last 8 months, my daily profits have been around 2.8 billion isk generated by daily sales of over 10bn. From this i need to take the Plex off. So, post Plex, it has been 2.2bn though in June was 1.8bn (see below for the one-offs).
High Sec Structures coming down
For me, i was in two iChooseYou stations and i chose to move to an NPC station in the same system to be on the safe side.
The whole cost of Asset Safety (0.5%) + Relisting my Sell Orders (1.5%) and the difference between the value of the relisted Sell Orders vs the old value came to 5.6bn isk.
Omega + MCT
The summary of it all is that i was coming to the point where i needed to buy 3 more months of Omega across my 4 Omega accounts and by spending 28bn isk i did just that for 25bn isk and for only 3bn more isk i got 3 months multiple character training across all my Omega characters. A 90% discount to normal prices.
Therefore, i am now in the skill farming market and there is a good chance that over the next 3 months i can easily cover the entire 28bn cost of this 3 month Omega and more.
Other One Offs
In June i spent 900m on a Large Skills injector to create for Sell Order capacity in one character and 5.2bn isk to buy +5 implants to speed up my skill point training (see above).
But, add the cost of moving out of iChooseYou stations and these implants all cost me around 12bn isk in June.
Plex sale
As is always the case, the price of Plex goes up as players buy Plex to take up the offer and i sold all my Plex (4500) at 5.6m isk each vs the holding cost of 4.4m.
Activity
I continue to come on once a day to update Sell orders and replace items sold. About 30-45 minutes. Getting closer to 45 minutes these days.
There are some week days where i don't log in at all if sales are low (summer can be slow) and/or real life time is tight.
Target daily sales required to achieve 1bn profits per day
In summary, i generally need to make 7.5bn sales per day assuming my item margin is 25%
As the cost of plex rises then my daily sales requirement also rises.
On the current taxation levels to make 30bn ISK per month i would need to cover:
- Plex costs of 3 x 500 x 4.7m = 7.1bn
- Courier costs 2% of sales (i.e. = purchase cost + collateral)
- Broker Listing fees 1.5% of sales
- Broker re-listing fees 0.3% of sales (lets assume all sales changed at least five times per month)
- Transaction Taxes 3.6% of sales
That all works out at 225bn monthly sales will generate profits after all costs including Plex of 30bn isk. = 7.5bn daily sales.
Bottom line is that assuming i make my 25% profit margins then each 1bn of sales creates profits of 164m and these go towards buying Plex for the Omega accounts and whatever is left is reinvested in the business.
Looking at some sensitivity analysis
- if my item margins were 28% instead of 25% then i need only make 192bn isk of sales (or 6.4bn per day)
- if Plex rose from 4.7m to 5.0m then then i need to make 228bn isk of sales (or 7.6bn per day)
Overall, the aim was to keep sales from falling 20%.
1) Plex the four omega accounts - aim number one all the time - achieved
2) Hold sales in Dodixie to down 20% - missed, sales down 44%
3) Hold sales in Amarr to down 20% - achieved, up 8%
4) Hold sales in Rens to down 20% - achieved, down 13%
5) Hold sales in Hek to down 20% - achieved, up 42%
6) Hold sales in Sobaseki to down 20% - achieved, up 61%
7) Hold sales in Tush-Murkon Prime to down 20% - missed, sales down 42%
8) Ramp up Arnon and Alentene - achieved
9) Hold the investment and profits in Manufacturing - missed
On balance, a positive month against expectations.
Reminder of my Current Business.
For now 99% of what i do is inter-regional trading - buying from Sell Orders in Jita to sell elsewhere. The rest is made up from Manufacturing and some Station Trading in Jita.
For Trading i focus on slow moving but high margin items. That keeps me away from fierce competition and i only need to sell an item once every 10 days to make good income. In other words, i don't really care if an item sells once every 10 or 20 days, if have many hundreds of items for sales across Eve and so each days a few items will sell and that generates all my income.
To put this in perspective. I had Sell Orders of 1156bn up at the start of June which generated sales of 382bn. In other words, i sold between 1% to 2% of everything i had for sale every day. That is slow and i like it. Not for me the cut and thrust of high volume low margin world. Slow and easy for me. Tortoise and hare stuff.
For this side of my business, lets call it Merchanting or inter-regional trading, i want to generate at least 1bn profits per day after all Plex costs (i used to target 10bn profits per month but that is an old target easily achieved to dropped).
My business model evolves over time. As my wealth increases i focus on higher value items. Therefore, i try also to stick to the rule of making a minimum of 100m profit per item sold. i.e. if i buy an item for 70m then i aim to sell it for at least 170m isk. This makes sure i don't waste my time on making low absolute profits and so preserves the 45 minute rule.
My main business is operated with four omega accounts (paid for with plex) with twelve alts.
The main Trading alts (all Omega) sit in Dodixie, Amarr, Rens and Hek. I have also omega alts in the new Trading locations of Sobaseki (in Lonetrek), Tash-Murkon Prime (in Tash-Murkon), Arnon (in Essence) and Alentene (in Verge Vendor).
The other Omega four alts sit in Jita and buy from Sell Orders, has these items couriered to the alts in Dodixie / Amarr and Rens / Hek and Sobaseki / Tash-Murkon Pime and Arnon / Alentene who then put them onto these markets for sale.
The Jita alts also serve to sell items that i can no longer sell in my trading locations Sort of clearance sales.
I also started in December 2021 to place alpha alts in other regions to see how it goes. I just need two of them to demonstrate that they can combine to justify an Omega account. Also, they need to take up very little of my time. So far the Sobesaki / Tash-Murkon alts and Arnon / Alentene made the grade and were upgraded in two accounts.
The other regions so far are: Placid; Citadel and Khanid. And i am in an NPC station in Delve and Outer Ring. I have started in Venal.
I am struggling to make the Low Sec locations work.
What do i sell?
I sell blueprints, skill books, implants and ship equipment.
I am trialling selling structures like jump gates, stations, station modules and other infrastructure items. This is doing better than i expected.
What was selling in June?
Implants, structures and ship equipment did well. Blueprints struggled.
There is a Blueprint competitor in Dodixie and Amarr who i am fighting. They seem to be on 24/7.
Implants are still doing well and tend to be the most competitive - i am slowly expanding into more types and moving up the ISK value curve. And rolling them out to all my Trade Hubs. They don't sell quickly but when they do i tend to get a whole family sold at a time (alpha, beta, delta, epsilon, gamma, omega). Again, that's how i like it. A 1-5 billion or so of investment can take 30 days to sell.
Ship equipment is a staple revenue stream for me, better in June. Especially Vorton items. and Deadspace items.
Mining equipment is making a comeback of sorts but is competitive.
Skill books are now my lowest income generator - very few sales now. Barely happening at all.
Jita
Traditionally i never sold anything in Jita unless it was being transported back from one of my trading hubs because i could not sell it and so to be sold at Jita prices to get some isk back.
For a while over winter i did very good Blueprint sales but the main competitor returned in February and forced me out of the market.
I also do station trading in Jita (that is - put Buy Orders up in Jita and then when those Buy Orders are executed i then put the item up for Sale in Jita at a higher price). I stick to the slow moving items again. That said, i don't actually know how much this earns me but i know it is getting better. The margins are huge. I am buying items for 500m and selling them for 1bn.
Also, in JIta, i manufacture items and sell them in the Jita market.
Manufacturing
I am now eleven months into my Manufacturing project. It remains slow and i need to up my game (i know, i said that before).
In June i made 3bn of sales generating an item profit of 0.7bn and so after taxes a profit of 0.5bn.
Barely happening.
Other High Sec Trading Locations
I don't want to spend all my time on Eve doing Regional Trading (buying from one region, mainly Jita, to sell to another) but i do want to see if i can find really low competition but stable revenue streams of trading.
The current alpha account regions so far are: Placid; Citadel and Khanid. And i am in an NPC station in Delve, Outer Ring and now Venal.
My alts in Arnon and Alentene were upgraded to Omega during January.
In these alpha accounts i am winding them down. I don't want to convert anymore to Omega.
In June the Sell Orders in Placid expired and i will transport the unsold items back to Jita.
Delve
I want to experiment with selling in null/low Sec. Hence, i have found an NPC station in Delve and started experimenting with items to sell.
It is not going well - sometimes threatens to improve but then fall back again.
As with my other alpha accounts i am letting it wither away on the vine.
I am rethinking how to make low/null sec work.
Plex
I am aim to store up to 6 months of Omega for each of the Omega accounts which would mean buying 12000 Plex (= 6 x 4 x 500).
That said, CCP are changing their attitude to Omega prices and there is a permanent sale on that gives a discount to the Plex required for longer periods of Omega purchases.
Given my sale at the start of June i currently hold none. When the price falls back to around 4.6m i will start to rebuild stocks.
A minor accounting point (again)
Similar to back in September 2022, i have to think how i account for buying three months of Omega for each Omega account (4 accounts). I repeated this in December and again in February and now again in June.
Right now, i have spent 28bn isk to Omega my accounts to October / November.
Lets make it easy and assume all 4 Accounts are Omega'd for 3 months (July, August, September).
The way i account for this is to hold the entire amount as wealth and reduce this "asset" by a month at a time.
The alternative accounting treatment would be to call the 28bn spent as a cost in June and then have no Omega costs in July to September.
It all adds up to the same number just the timing of recognising the cost is different.
So, for each of the next 3 months i will recognise a cost of 9.3bn isk as Plex/Omega cost. (actually, this is part Omega cost and part the Multiple Character Training costs discussed above).
Analysis of Trading Profits
In total i made 382bn ISK of sales in June which made me item profits of 109bn ISK.
(item profit is the simply difference between sales done vs costs spent buying products, so before fees and taxes. Because i don't yet invest in items other than Plex i don't make any allowance for items still in stock - in part because i don't track the cost per item spent).
Overall, sales fell by 8% in June mainly due to Dodixie sales coming off 44% from a very strong May.
Amarr this time was the best selling trade hub with 99bn sales (normally it is Dodixie), followed by Dodixie 81bn, jita (station trading doing better), Rens 42bn and Hek 39bn.
Sobaseki at 37bn almost caught up with Hek - unlikely to repeat in June i feel.
Sobaseki + Tash murkon did 54bn whilst Arnon + Alentene did 23bn.
The item profits of 109bn was an item margin of 28.4% (109/384) vs my target of 25%. 28% us within the normal range, so happy here.
From this I then need to take a whole series of costs off before i get to my Business profits (and notice how they are more related to Sales rather than costs):
Courier Fees: i aim to pay 2% of sales value to the Courier = 8.1bn
Sales tax cost me 10.5bn ISk (=2.73% of sales) - the Dodixie, Amarr, Rens, Hek Sobaseki, Tash-Murkon, Arnon and Alentene and Jita characters are level 5 in Accounting (=sales tax of 3.6%); and of course all the alpha alt accounts are only Level 1 (=sales tax of 8%). Not sure why the tax rate is below the base.
Broker Fees costs me 17.2bn (=4.5% of sales, Dodixie is more competitive so i was changing prices more and i had to relist all Sell Orders in Sobaseki and Alentene as discussed above). Now, i can break this down into the initial listing fee of 1.5% (because i am Level 5 Broker Relations on all Omega characters and lets to make the sums easier and include all the alpha alts) and therefore the rest is the cost of changing the price which is 0.30% a shot (i may have that 0.30% completely wrong!).
So, Listing Fee = 1.5% x 384= 5.7bn and so the Relisting Fee = 17.2-5.7 = 11.5bn which is 2.2% of sales. That shows that i do change prices quite often, bias to Amarr, Jita and now Dodixie. Someone is taking me on in Dodixie. Will need to be crushed.
Manufacturing Job Cost fees were 1.0bn (i produced alot but sold little).
This takes my 'Business Profits' to 74bn ISK for June vs 77bn in May. This is what 30-40 minutes a day in June gave me.
A number of my Couriers got ganked and so the surplus collateral that flows to me added 2.1bn to profits.
And then i had a number of one off costs of 11.7bn isk discussed above.
So, the post-tax margin is 19.4% (74/384) and so i achieved the 15% target.
The omega charge was then 6.7bn for June.
That, therefore, is the road map from 384bn sales to 56bn increase in wealth.
Each night, i get home from work and determine what i need to sell in all the locations.
The time is taken changing prices were necessary (especially Amarr given it is competitive and increasingly Dodixie) and then figuring out what to sell with the ISK made from the prior 24 hours sales.
I have a list of items that feature regularly and i add to this list as time goes by. So is a case of checking Jita prices vs current location prices.
The Rens, Hek, Sobaseki, Tash Murkon, Arnon and Alenetene markets take less than 2 minutes each to check.
To look up prices in Eve I am using Eve Tycoon which seems to have more of the latest items in its market browser. I used to use evemarketer but i just got used to Eve Tycoon.
Each night i courier about 10 to 50bn ISK of items from Jita. Used to be 2-10bn but things are better these days and i have more items up for sale. The total cargo volume is 10-250m3 per shipment though more recently often over 10,000m3. So small but valuable items. But this allows the couriers to use small, fast ships with much less chance of being ganked. So there is always someone willing to pick up the contract quickly.
I pay a generous 1.5 to 2.0% of collateral as fees. I am more interested in getting my items onto the market quickly than penny pinching on distribution costs.
Outlook
July will have the same ten conservative aims - summer can be slow. Hence, the aims will be:
1) Plex the four omega accounts - aim number one all the time
2) Hold sales in Dodixie to down 20%
3) Hold sales in Amarr to down 20%
4) Hold sales in Rens to down 20%
5) Hold sales in Hek to down 20%
6) Hold sales in Sobaseki to down 20%
7) Hold sales in Tush-Murkon Prime to down 20%
8) Ramp up Arnon and Alentene
9) Hold the investment and profits in Manufacturing
The daily sales in June averaged 12.3bn.
Current wealth is 1.12 trillion ISK made up from:
- Plex held as an investment 0bn ISK
- Items in hanger for sale 26bn ISK
- Items in hanger for use in business 11bn ISK
- Omega brought forward 33bn ISK
- Buy orders on the market 64bn ISK
- items for sale 1210bn ISK
- less a 20% provision 242bn ISK*
When i add up my wealth, 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 or are used to generate isk that can be readily resold back onto the market. Any ships or skills or fittings etc i buy are counted as expenses in that month. The only exception to this rule is Blueprint Originals i use for manufacturing. They are held at cost.
* 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.
