Trading – Patch Speculation

Many people can use patch notes or Dev announcements to invest smart in long term speculation on things that are gonna change and make a ton of isk with the changes (ex: gila, mineral and BPO changes). Other variation is a short term speculation, trading incessantly new items put in the market and make huge profits before those items become common (I can remember the gnosis giveaway or the insertion of T3 dessys).

I personally usually stay away from both forms of speculation due to one simple factor: I’m lazy. Once again for in order for the speculation to work you need to make the proper moves, at the proper time. Long term speculations requires some ISK capital to be invested and tied up until the changes occur and it might take some time before you to manage to make a full profit, due to heavy competition. Short term speculations require you to be on top of the event as things progress and have a very narrow window of opportunity.

Actually long term speculation is somewhat compatible with my trade method, and I even would have some capital to invest, the fact that it attracts so much competition, kinda drives me away from it.

This being said, it’s still very important for traders to be aware of changes. Just because you’re not embarking the “Speculation Train” it does not means there isn’t a profit to be made. As an example I’ll talk about the recent faction armor plates changes.

Once I read that CCP was gonna buff faction armor plates, I logged in my market toons to find out that sell orders had already been bought. Someone had already bough all the faction armor plates from most markets, even though there was a low quantity of them to begin with. That someone certainly hold on to them until the changes went live and made a “quick” profit. I say “quick” because with items that don’t sell much, it might take still an extended amount of time to make decent profits. On my end, I added those faction armor plates to my spreadsheet, waited for a week until prices stabilized a bit and checked if there was a profit to be made with this “new “ item. In fact I been trading those faction armor plates myself with some profit, and even thought they sell very little, it was a nice addition to my trade items list.

Patches and item changes make, at least, a good opportunity for you to change your trade items list and adapt accordingly, even if you don’t “speculate” like myself.

Trading - November 2015 Report

Here goes the November 2015 Report

MARKET PROFITS

This month I achieved around 10 billion profit. This was achieved with my usual tactic of resupplying market once per week, before the weekend, and updating order once per 2 days or so. Overall relaxed process, though I cannot go for too long without updating my orders.

PLEX EXPENSES

I spent 4 PLEX to pay my 2 accounts, 1.2 billion each PLEX… I injected 2 PLEX instead of just the usual 1 because my account expiration date was getting too near. I had 3 days left when I renewed my subscription, so I just said, “The hell with it, inject some more!”. This way I have a bigger margin of time.

 

BLUEPRINTS

I managed to make 3 billion Isk profit. Most my profit came from selling researched BPOs and only 0,3% from selling BPCs. I sold 145 contracts and each contract nets me a profit of around 20 million Isk average. For now, I still think it’s pretty much easy isk, but contract management is indeed becoming the occasional pain. Not only I put up 50-60 contracts at same time, but I also get 15-20 contracts that expire at same time. Starting to wish EVE had a “Renew Contract” button that would just put my contract up with the same previous settings.

 

HAULING EXPENSES

I kept only used public contracts, advertising in in-game channel “Haulers Channel”, paying out 30 mil (no matter to what hub I haul to), but setting collateral to 2 billion and hauling around 1.8 billion. My hauling expenses were 900 million

As long as I don’t mess up the collateral value, I should be fine. Need double attention on that particular factor.

MISCELANEOUS INVESTMENTS

Got 68 mil profit in T2 BPCs bought from another ex-corp mate. This is really low for the amount of hassle on dealing with contracts. I definitely won’t be investing in T2 BPCs anytime soon, and I’m eager to just get rid of all the T2 BPCs I have.

As for buying and reselling capital BPOs I managed to make 725 million profit. Unfortunately I have BPOs that are not selling fast enough, but I still consider Capital BPOs a decent investment so far.

Also Battleship BPOs have not given me any profit for a whole month. Although they might initially seem as good as Capital BPOs, due to similar prices, there seems to be more competition and even less demand. Starting to regret entering this niche… I’m gonna play the “Let’s wait and see” card once again.

As a funny note, one of my public contracts got suicide ganked. It was hauling 3.7Bil, and I had the collateral set to 4Bil, so I got an instant profit of 300mil. Sure, it was annoying to buy it all back the following week, but did not really got all that pissed. It was instant profit with less market orders updates. Did not affected my faith in public contracts.

 

October 2015 Report

Here goes the October 2015 Report

MARKET PROFITS

This month I almost managed to break my record, achieving 10.5 billion profit. I actually did not updated any market orders during October’s last week because I went out in vacations with my family and decided to also take a break from EVE, so did not even install it in my travel laptop. If I had updated my orders during that week I’d probably made another billion Isk or so profit.

PLEX EXPENSES

I spent 2 PLEX to pay my accounts, 1.2 billion each… Nothing out of the ordinary here.

BLUEPRINTS

This month came to a very nice surprise! I managed to make 2 billions Isk profit. Most my profit came from selling researched BPOs and only 4.5% from selling BPCs. Sorting out contracts is boring, but the whole process is really easy and smooth, so it’s really easy isk. This month I decided to settle with a list of around 275 BPOs to research. It should take a whole lot of time to research them all, so I don’t need to bother with resupplying BPOs any time soon.

HAULING EXPENSES

I really changed my strategy here. I only used public contracts, paying out the same as Red Frog charges, but setting collateral to 2 billion and hauling around 1.8 billion. I reduced my expenses from 1.1 billion to 700 million while pretty much moving around the same amount of stuff. More on this topic in upcoming month, but so far is really helping me reduce costs.

MISCELANEOUS INVESTMENTS

I pretty much sold every BPO/BPC I had bought in firesale from my ex-corpmate, making a total of 600 millions profit over 4 month time. I’m pretty much gonna consider this investment over.

I also bought 180 millions of T2 BPCs from another Ex corp mate that did not wanted them, and I’m selling those out at more than 50% profit. Unfortunately, BPCs don’t really sell all that well, don’t know why. Probably it’s because the BPC is consumed along the manufacture process, so it’s more viewed as a needed expense by industrialists, while a T1 researched BPO might be faced more as an investment… I don’t know really. This experiment is also good to check out the BPC contract system, and I’m really not impressed, so probably won’t even consider it in the near future.

As for buying and reselling capital BPOs I managed to make 600 million profit. One thing I noticed is that, in case you don’t sell your BPO fast, successive contracts will probably eat your profit. Contract taxes for a 2.5 billion BPO are expensive when you’re looking for a 200/300 mil profit or so. Also, right now with the capital rebalance, the researched Capital BPO market is really really saturated, so competition is getting high and prices dropping like a rock… Might have to put this endeavor on hold while this whole “Capital rebalance” madness calms down.

I’ve also searched to invest in reselling Battleships and Battlecruiser BPOs. From what I see, Battlecruisers BPOs going for around 800mil researched, don’t really offer a chance for the large quick profit I expect. Researched Battleships BPOs going for around 2-2.5 billion actually might, but I’m unsure on how well they sell, so I decided to try it out and see how goes. I’ll let you know next month.

October 2013 – September 2015 Balance, revisited

I decided to take another look to my last 2 years as a trader. This post is going to be an “add-on” to my previous post http://curses-im-in-my-pod.blogspot.pt/2015/07/trading-2013-2015-financial-report.html so please read it 1st. Everything I previously said pretty much still applies but I also want to dwell into my expenses (PLEX consumption and hauling process) and into my Blueprint endeavor.

Here is the Balance updated version in a table and a quick explanation:

Buy (Isk) field – It’s pretty much everything I buy from the market. Important note! This includes PLEX that I use to pay subscription and stockpile a bit, plus my expenses with PVP ships.

Sell (Isk) field – It’s everything I sell in the market. It pretty much represents the items I trade. I don’t really sell anything other than I buy in Jita, exception to the occasional faction mod that I grab from some poor fella who came into my scram range, or some mods that I might buy at discount from corp, but those number are hardly relevant.

Market Profit (Bil Isk) – This is the profit value provided by the program “EVE Profit”, using the “First in/First out” method.

Hauling Expenses (Bil Isk) – Isk spent with courier contracts. This includes the cost of hauling stuff from Jita do other empire Hubs and also the cost of hauling PVP stuff from Jita to Curse.

Plex Expenses (Bil Isk) – The value of PLEX consumed to pay for my accounts or other services (like switching toons between accounts).

Blueprint Profit (Bil Isk) – Isk made considering the “Contract Sell Value” minus the “Blueprint Cost”

Blueprint Expenses (Bil Isk) – Expenses related to the Blueprint research activity, such as courrier contracts, corp office rental or others.

Misc Investment (Bil Isk) – These represent several miscellaneous investments outside the Market sphere, such as the “Ex-Corp mate Stash” posted at http://curses-im-in-my-pod.blogspot.pt/2015/08/trading-blueprints-corp-mate-stash.html and re-selling contracts.

Balance (Bil Isk) – This should pretty much be my liquid wealth increase in the end of the month

Expenses/Profit (%) – This is the % that all the expenses represent over all the Profits.

Still, in order to truly analyze the data and talk better with you fellas, I prefer to show you the data in form of a graph, so here is the “Overall Graph”:

MARKET PROFITS

In my previous post at http://curses-im-in-my-pod.blogspot.pt/2015/07/trading-2013-2015-financial-report.html I pretty much presented and extensive view  onto my market profits, considering the value calculated by the program “EVE Profit”, using the “First In, First Out” method, and how they evolved considering my real life issues. I have really nothing extra to say about it so we’ll proceed to the next chapter.

PLEX EXPENSES

Back in January 2010 I made the promise to myself to not spend any real life money on EVE, so I used Plex ever since. This value represents the PLEX I consume. Extra Plex that I buy and stockpile in my hangar is NOT considered here. 

Looking at the graph, in 2013 and 2014, you can see I used to spend about 2 Billion in PLEX, while paying for 3 accounts. 2 accounts were training my PVP toons and 1 account was training my Jita Market toon. In fact, I was so clueless on what to train in my Jita Market toon because he had indeed already obtained the relevant trade skills long long ago, that I was actually training him for some neutral support in PVP. He has 0 Skillpoints in gunnery, but has decent drones and missiles skills, being able to use Blockade Runners, Mining Barges, Missile Assault Frigates, Logistics, Hictors, Dictors, Recons, Cover Ops, Interceptors, Drone/Missile Battleships, Tengu, Drone/Missile Heavy Assault Cruisers, Drone/Missile Battlecruisers, Golem, Thanatos, and last but not least, a Phoenix with T2 Siege module! HELL YEAH!!... but I really never used it in any of it, except maybe in a guardian doing some ninja salvaging couple years ago.

This meant that training the Jita Toon was useless, and with PLEX prices increasing and my own revenues decreasing right after reaching my all low “Baby Arriving” spike, I decided to drop 1 account, reducing my expenses. In October 2014 I have a low spike in my PLEX expenses because I had to use 4 PLEX to move relevant market toons between accounts.

The following month I had indeed a reduction in my PLEX expenses, but due to the permanent price increase, I’m spending as much isk now with 2 PLEX as I was back in March 2014 with 3 PLEX… Auch…

BLUEPRINT PROFITS/EXPENSES

I recently started the whole Blueprints Research endeavor in May 2015, and comparing to my my “Market Profits” the income is truly…. Low. Not only that, you can see I had a huge “Blueprint Expenses” (about 2 Billions) in July 2015. This is mostly because I needed to train my Market toons with proper research skills, consuming 2 PLEX to activate multiple character training in same account. Since August 2015 I have 4 Toons with the necessary skills to research low tier BPOs.

These 2 PLEX were not included into the “PLEX expenses” category for a simple reason. I want all the expenses directly associated with the Blueprint endeavor to be properly separated, in order to have an idea how long it’ll take to retrieve my initial investment.

In continuation to my post http://curses-im-in-my-pod.blogspot.pt/2015/09/trading-blueprints-where-to-research.html, using a corp office and putting all the blueprint in corp hangar is really awesome! Every Blueprint is avalable to any of my toons, and every toon of mine can deliver jobs, no matter who started the job. Everything is really available to all toons and makes it all pretty easy.

During May, June and July my Blueprint endeavor consisted in researching low tier BPOs to the max, and sell them in public contracts in Jita. 

In the end of September my initial investment of 2 billions was pretty much covered, but I decided to upgrade the operation a bit more… I installed a small POS with an Hyasyoda Lab in order to research my BPOs faster. I want to start researching higher tier BPOs and I trully only need to undock and go to the POS once per month, so not big hassle. I purchased already like 6 month of fuel. 

I used this opportunity to buy “Beancounter MY-703” and” Beancounter RR-603” to 2 of my toons, to increase the reseach speed. They cost around 25 mil and in theory increase the research for 3%, but in reality, due to how EVE stacks bonus it’s really only 1% in the end… Not really worth, so I ain’t buying more to the rest of my toons.

This means that I ended up investing a total of around 700mil, even though I can get some isk back if I sell the Tower later on. I’m also considering the POS Fuel in stock as an expense.

The total balance for the Blueprint endeavor is -708 Millions, meaning that 6 month after starting with the whole process I ain’t achieving a positive balance just yet, mostly due to investing in a POS. Still is really not a big problem, and a positive balance should be achieved by the end of October.

In August I decided to expand my business a bit more and decided to start making BPCs too. I dislike how little low-tier BPC are worth, so had to do some research and decided I’d try to sell, Sov Infrastructure Upgrade BPCs after researching the BPOs slightly. Currently I have 1 Billion invested in Sov Infrastructure Upgrade BPCs BPOs researched up to ME/TE 5/12, with the main intention of creating BPCs. This is really not an “expense” and more an “investment” because I can try to sell these BPOs later on at a profit.

You can also see the results in the following table. 

In September I sold 189 mil worth in BPCs, 956 mil worth in BPOS, for a total of 1.1 Bil from around 50 completed contracts. BPOs represented 83% of the Blueprint profits. I have around 85 outstanding public contracts in Jita waiting for you to buy them all.

My objective if for the whole Blueprint endeavor to pay for a PLEX per month… Not quite there just yet, but very close, if it maintains the same results.

The work involved in researching BPOs is also minimal, with only a few easy clicks, though the biggest hassle is indeed dealing with expired contracts and putting new contracts up. Comparing Blueprint Profits to Market Profits might look as they’re minimal, but is still good easy isk, and 1 billion in a month is nothing to scoff at!

HAULING EXPENSES

I stated previously that I use Red Frog Freight to do my hauling, but it wasn’t always like that. I used to autopilot freight runs from Jita to my hubs, and when I only traded 1 billion at a time, it was really not a big problem. Eventually, my business grew and I was putting 4 billions into my AFK autopilot hauling freight. You can already imagine what happened…

So after I got suicide ganked for a total of 5 billion loss (including my Obelisk), I turned over to Red Frog and pretty much never undocked again.

I went to check my hauling expenses and put them into the “Overall Graph”. I’ll link it here again so you don’t have to scroll up. 

Hauling expenses have been pretty much minimal from October 2013 to October 2014, followed by a small increase up to February 2015 and huge increase since that date. This is mostly due to Red Frog Freight increasing their rates by A LOT! Going from Jita do Dodixie cost 8.5 mil in October 2013 and went up to 26 mil in September 2015. Suicide gank groups have proliferated in empire, even if we exclude events like “Jita Burn”, so users are paying the bill. 

Not only that, in order to easy the logistics load onto my corp mates and because I do have isk available, since march 2015 I started paying Black Frog Freight to haul my stuff from Jita to K-QWHE in Curse. Each run costs around 370 million. Even though is not a market related expense, it’s an expense that does makes me a hole in the wallet, so I need to include it.

Here is my hauling expenses table:

HAULING TRIPS

I feel it’s also interesting to take a look into my Hauling trips per hub stats. It’s pretty accurate to say that hauling trips can represent fairly nicely the volume of business in each hub, considering that each trip takes around 1 Billion worth of stuff. Here is the graph:

 

In October 2014 I took 5 billions to Tash-Murkon hub, but it did not provided good results. I can even understand why. Tash-Murking is a small hub, too close to Amarr and it sells, mostly cheap mods that I run away from. It’s not the place to sell structures, implants, capital mods or faction mods. It’s a place to sell ships modules and even then at a small rate. I quickly abandoned that experiment.

In the beginning of 2014 I actually traded in Amarr, but I was never too fond of the results. Profit margins crashed too fast for my taste due to lot’s of competition. I believe Amarr to be better place for station trading rather than regional trading since it has an already considerable movement. Volume taken to Amarr decreased during 2014 and I eventually abandoned it completely in 2015.

In late 2013 I traded in Rens, but also never liked the results much. Generally there were good profit margins, but competition was weirdly large. I left Rens for dead up until January 2015, when I tried to bring it back to life, but honestly at this point I was having too many market orders to manage daily, considering I was also trading in Dodixie and Hek, so Rens entered hibernation again.

Dodixie is my good old mate, being my favorite hub up to March 2015. Decent margins, decent sales and not too much competition in my sales categories, as long as I updated my orders once per day, or profits would drop to 0. Things changed after march 2015, partially due to my fault. Not only I stopped updating my orders daily, but I tried to sell more and more faction mods in Dodixe, leaving implants, capital mods and structures behind. Both were bad calls. Faction items in Dodixie have way way more competition than other categories and profit margins are shattered faster. Also I could achieve good profits in Hek while only updating market orders once per 3 days or so, representing less work, and therefore contributing to put Dodixie a bit in the side.

Hek was indeed a great surprise and success. I went to Hek after leaving Rens in December 2013 and was love at first sight. It pretty much went from 0 to Dodixie levels in a couple month. Also I expanded my sale items list in Hek, specially faction mods that did not work all that well in Dodixie. After march 2015 I decided to give Hek a big boost in volume, mostly because like stated previously, I could have good profits with less work and less market orders updates. Even though this strategy worked nicely and my profits have been consistently better, with less work, it does represents a vulnerability in my strategy. If “something happens” to Hek, I’ll be in major trouble, because I’m indeed putting all my eggs in the same basket… I’ll try invest a bit more in Dodixie to spread more my investments.

HAULING SUICIDE GANKS

I could not skip to talk about suicide ganks. I requested around 800 trips in empire, from Jita to other hubs and got suicide ganked 8 times, so about 1% of my trips. I supose it’s not too bad. Still suicide ganks are annoying because even though you get your collateral back, you’re still losing Isk bigtime. If stuff is not in the market, then is not making me a profit, not to mention that the time I spent buying all the stuff is completely lost.

My last suicide gank was in September 2015, and the Red Frog pilot greed also probably had a role to play in it. The pilot took 2 of my contracts to the same hub, at the same time, in the same freight, moving effectively with 2 billions worth of stuff, thus making himself a juicier target. After this event I started looking for alternatives and joined “Haulers Channel” ingame.

These fellas pick up public contracts linked in chat, so I decided to give it a shot, while choosing my own reward and collateral. I made a small test and decided to maintain the reward I’d give Red Frog, but I increased the volume of stuff hauled to 1.6 Billions and set the collateral at 2.0 Billions.

Guess what… IT WAS ALSO SUICIDED GANKED… seriously?! The first ever public courier contract I gets blown into pieces. Still after the initial impact I thought about it a bit better and it didn’t turned out all that bad. I just happened to make 400 million profit in 1 day. Maybe even more than I’d make in the market, considering I have around 18% average profit in my market stuff. Can’t really decide if this public courier contract was a failure (cargo did not arrive destination) or a huge success because I made a decent profit. Surely enough, this “profit” will not show up in the “logs”. In order for this “profit” to no disappear into thin air, I manually inserted the 400mil profit into my “Misc. Investment” category… I’ll get on that later on.

And yes, I’ll definitely be making more public couriers with 1.5 billions in cargo and 2 billions collateral. I just need to make sure I don’t mix up the “reward” field with the “collateral” field while putting the public contract up…

MISCELANEOUS INVESTMENTS

I been trying to expand my investments, mostly via the contract system, because I already have a list of 600+ items to integrate the Market Regional Trade. These investments consist right now mostly in:

 - Ex-Corp Mate Blueprint Stash initially posted at

- Capital BPOs re-sales

- Other weird stuff

Concerning my Ex-Corp Mate Blueprint Stash, after the initial 675 million investment in July, and considering the base cost of a BPO 11,7 mil (the final value was reached dividing the 675 millions per 58 BPOs) and the BPCs for free, I achieved an income of 979 mil, translating on a profit of 523 mil, from 60 public contracts.

While trying to escalade my Blueprints endeavor, I noticed that some smart fellas are able to buy researched Capital BPOs at a good price, and them resell them at a profit. Of course I added those guys to my contacts in order to analyze better their methods, by looking at their contract history and having a glimpse on how to make good isk the same way. Right now I invested in some researched Capital BPOs and am trying to sell them. Let’s see how goes. I made 181 mil profit reselling researched Capital BPOs

As for weird stuff, I designed my spreadsheet to include stuff like a suicide gank profit or loss. Since I know I made a 400 mil “profit” from my last suicide gank, I decided to include it in the “Misc. Investment” category.

OTHER PROFIT/EXPENSES

There are some factors that are not represented in my spreadsheets. For example, from time to time I bring faction mods that I looted from my kills, from Curse to Empire. These are acquired for “free” or at a low price from Corp Hangar and then sold in a Market Hub. These profits are not properly accounted for, but tend to be pretty minimal.

BALANCE

Finally, taking in account all the income and all the expenses we obtain the “Balance” and it pretty much represents the isk that I earn each month. Here is the “Overall Balance” graph again so you don’t have to scroll up.

Not much more needs being said about it, except that I want my balance to be HUUUUUUGGGEEEE. Easier said than done ofc, specially because I want to continue spending no more than 20-30 minutes per day (in average) doing market stuff or earning isk.

In order to try increase my profits, I’m trying out the whole low tier Blueprint Research and Sov Infrastructure Upgrade BPCs project, as well as trying to resell researched Capital BPOs.

In order to diminish my expenses, that tend to eat around 30% of my profits, specially after Red Frog increased their prices around may 2015, I’m trying to put up some public courier contracts in Haulers Channel, at more advantageous terms than provided by Red Frog.

Lastly, according to EVEAssets my wealth goes around 130 bil. The reason I’m putting this “statistic” for last is because I don’t really care much about this number. The only reason I want a HUUUUGGEEEEEE balance is to be able to buy many ships to blow up in space. It’s much more important for me to achieve an easy, fast and efficient process to make a lot of isk monthly, rather than having many assets. My asset’s job is to provide my daily fix of adrenaline and meet it’s creator at the Source in a blazing explosion!