segunda-feira, 24 de agosto de 2015

Trading – Blueprints - Corp Mate Stash



By pure coincidence, an ex-corp mate of mine was doing a firesale in Curse. Among his stuff was a bunch of 65 BPOs, half of them fully researched, half of them partially researched, made up by stuff from PVP mods, T1 frigates up to R.A.M. components. He also had a bunch of Battleship and Battlecruiser BPCs. 

He asked me to throw an offer for the whole lot, and I decided to give him 10mil/BPO and considered the BPCs free, so a total of 650mil. I don’t know much about the BPO market, but I’m convinced I can make a profit. After all, 10mil is fully researched small ammo BPO.

Another corp mate hauled them from Curse to Empire for free (I paid him 50mil, but because he’s a cool guy in need for isk, so not gonna count this 50mil as an expense), and in empire Red Frog costed me about 25mil to haul to Jita. Total expense is 675 mil.

In order to not mix this stash with my own startup BPO research adventure, the “Firesale BPOs” are gonna be sold exclusively by my PVP toons. Therefore I can achieve easily accurate numbers on selling this stash.

I’ve already started to sell a couple, as you can see in next picture, but the real question is: How long is gonna take to make my investment back, and how much total profit can I achive? I got no idea.  




  Right now, a month and a half has passed since I started to sell this stash, and I made 540 mil income, with a profit of 320 mil, considering the “cost” per 10 mil BPO and free BPCs. Also, I’ve decided to NOT finish the partially researched BPOs for couple reasons:
- Will allow me a good idea on how fast/expensive I can sell partially researched BPOs and compare it to fully researched similar BPOs;
- I don’t wanna spend slots from my Indy toons researching 30+ day items that compose the majority of the partially researched BPOs from the stash. For now, my strategy is to focus in researching “fast” items, and gonna stick to that until I reach a conclusion;
- I really want my 675mil investment back as fast as possible. I trully hate not having my items ready and avaliable to be sold. (Hence why I also don’t like to invest much in market “buy orders”)

Thinking a bit further about BPOs research, the fact that I can haul from Curse to Empire for free means that I can even train my PVP toons to research BPOs in my home system, making a total of 6 toons doing it. Even managing contracts of item up in Jita is easy enough! After all, is only 1 month training…

I’ll get back on this once I got some more data.

segunda-feira, 17 de agosto de 2015

Trading - Blueprints - 1st research batch


I still had some unresearched BPOs from 2010 lying around, so I’d start with those. Also had to train one of my trade toons. I stopped training Rtb that has 110mil SP and was training for “irrelevant skill Lvl 5” and during about 1 month got the following skills trained in one of my trade toons:
-        - Advanced Laboratory Operation lvl 4
-        - Laboratory Operation lvl 5
-        - Metallurgy lvl 5
-        - Research lvl 5
-        - Scientific Networking lvl 2
-        - Corporation Contracting lvl 4
-        - Contracting lvl 4

This pretty much means I have 10 research slots. At the present time I won’t bother with BPCs because they really seem to not make much Isk per unit. You can check my sale/profits in the next spreadsheet.


 Some quick notions:
- Job cost is considered “0” because it’s so damn cheap it ain’t worth me bothering about it;
- BPO cost was considered at current Jita prices. Some are seeded by NPCs and some are seeded by players, and even though those particular BPOs were bought back in 2010, I doubt prices changed much.
- Contracts can’t really be changed the way market orders are, so a bad initial price will make them be “in stasis” for 15 days.

1st thing to notice (and I already kinda expected it) is that % Profit is useless data. Sure, it’s cool to sell something at 2000% profit, but it might still be a low amount of Isk, so I’ll prolly just delete that field in a future update of the spreadsheet. The data that I’m really looking for is “Total Profit”and “Isk/day”. The “Isk/day” takes in account the time the BPO took to research and the time it took to sell, therefore it’s also important to know how many times it was put on contracts, before someone actually took it.

Some BPOs managed to be sold a bit overpriced (like the Reactor Control Unit) but I bet it was more due to temporary offer/demand circumstances rather than it being a special ultra profitable item overlooked by the competition.

Also initially I tried to sell the researched BPOs in the same system where I researched them, in order to avoid more clicks and avoid paying Red Frog Freight to transport them to a Hub, but soon became obvious it was NOT gonna work. All BPOs, except for the first 2 contracts, were sold in Jita.

I honestly expected a bigger difficulty selling the BPOs. Research time, although
“lengthy” is a controlled factor. Selling something in contracts is totally random, and I expected more contracts to end their time limit without being sold.
Nevertheless my inexperience in this area, I managed to make around 400mil profit in about 2 month, totally AFK and with a few dozen clicks! Considering this is a startup project, I’m taking the results as being very positive.

Now… this was the easy part… In fact, I researched a bunch of old, in stock, BPOs. Here are my main concerns for the future:
- Deciding what BPOs I’m gonna research on a regular basis;
- Figuring out what’s more profitable (isk/day) to research: 3, 7, 11 or 23 days BPOs;
- Figuring out if I’m gonna have a bottleneck using contracts as my sales system (BPOs not selling fast enough and starting to stockpile in my hangar)
- Managing inventory and resupply operations. With market items it’s quite easy because I can just export my orders into Google Docs… Can’t do that with contract to my knowledge. Maybe a 3rd party program like EVE Assets can help…
- Managing costs of hauling BPOs from Jita to the research system, and back. No I ain’t undocking to move crap around, so stop giving me those looks!

Still the initial result convinced me to train 3 more toons into this Research BPO thingie. Next step is to develop my Integrated BPO Research Strategy… or something…

quarta-feira, 5 de agosto de 2015

Trading - Blueprints – Opportunity for AKF Isk?




I’ve never looked into Blueprints. Research, copy or manufacture. I did some manufacture in 2010 in null, but hardly serve as any kind of experience in this subject.

Recently EVE has undergone some industrial changes, and I did not really understood what happened. I read the blogs sure, but meant nothing to me, except for a small change that I put on hold in a dark corner of my brain. Research and manufacture slots were removed. Now you can do those activities in any system that supports it.

Recently, looking for other way to make AFK Isk, I decided to dwell a bit more into BPO research/copies. Not understanding anything about it I came up with a series of questions that needed some answer before I moved on:
1)      Is researching BPOs in empire expensive?
2)      Once a BPO is researched, is it worth keeping it and making copies, or just sell the BPO?
3)      What are good BPOs/BPCs to sell via contracts?
4)      How do I get a “BPO contract history” similar to a market item history;
5)      How do I get a “BPO contract volume” similar to a market item volume;
6)      How fast are BPO/BPC contracts accepted by buyers.

Other similar questions arise in my head, but you get the point. I turned to EVE Forum to look for answers lurking up to long forgotten pages. I came up to the following conclusions with some minor testing/background research. Feel free to laugh at my face if you already know the blueprint market inside/out and realize that I’m wrong here…
- Cheap BPOs are basically free to research. By “Cheap” I mean up to medium or even large ship mods;
- BPOs are kinda grouped into “research time classes”. For me, “low end” blueprints, in empire, take 3, 7, 11 or 23 days to fully research;
- BPCs for those items seem to be stupid cheap and there are lots of offers. Don’t know if there’s much Isk to be made in such “low end” item BPCs
- Isk value for low end BPOs are kinda related to the time they take to research, but I think that items that take 23 days to research don’t really sell all that much higher than those that take 11 days.
- Offer/demand still plays a big role on prices. A BPO that takes 7 days to research can be sold way way overpriced and by a lot more Isk than a 23 days BPO, if there are no others being offered via contracts.
- There is no “BPO contract history” or “BPO Contract Volume”. Only way to know how many “Expanded Cargohold Blueprints” are being sold on contracts in a month is to keep track manually/daily of all contracts… Hell no!

As a nice surprise you can see the “Contract history” of toons and corporations! I had no idea this option even existed!! You can just click a blueprint, look for it’s contractor, see his contract history, and you have a great idea on his strategy, how much that toon/corp sell, how long his contracts take to fulfill, what are his favorite items, etc etc etc. It works the complete opposite side of regular market where you only know someone’s name if you buy from them or vice-versa. There is still a problem. I have no idea how many times the “Item A” blueprint was put in contracts before being sold… might show on someone’s contract history sold in 2 days, but he could been trying to sell it for the 5th time, making it really 77 days.

Having done some research it’s time to put some ideas to the test.

terça-feira, 4 de agosto de 2015

Trading - Tools of trade




During a long time, I did not used any 3rd party tool, mostly because I did not knew any.
As already previously stated in my blog I use “EVE Profit” that can be found at http://192.40.57.168/war/EVE-Profit/. It’s completely free and it can manage all your buy and sell orders, in order to know the profit you are making using the “First in/First out” method. You also get track of all your items history. I always check it at the end of the day to see how well I’m doing. Once profits start going down, it’s time to replenish the market again.



Alternatively you can use the most developed “EVE-mogul” found at http://www.eve-mogul.com. It applies the same method but has more features. You need to pay with Isk a monthly subscription, but is real cheap. The only reason I don’t use it is because I already have my long database in “Eve-Profit” and it still suits my needs.

The 2nd tool I use a lot is “Evernus” found at http://evernus.com/. It’s currently supported by it’s developer, with regular updates. It’s a very powerful tool, but I really only have need for 1 feature. It will fetch your market orders and using the new CREST thingie, it will calculate how much you need to undercut your competition to get your orders on top again. Then you can simply copy/paste the value calculated by Evernus into your EVE client. Long story short, instead of melting your brain cells manually updating your orders value, you can jut copy/paste the proper value. It’s almost like cheating… In the EVE forum there have been posts questioning about how legal that is, and since Evernus does not changes EVE client in any way, it’s a legal move. Evernus also allows you to keep track of profits and much more, but I don’t use it that way. I simply use it to update orders real fast, being a great time saver to lazy people like me.

There is, of course, a downside. Sometimes I’m updating orders so fast, that I mess up, and drop the price of a 150mil item down to 40mil or so, making it being instantly sold in buy orders… Sure EVE asks me if I wanna really change my price X% from the regional value, but during the order update race I just press enter, only to realize later on I made a mistake… It’s not rare for me to have more Isk losses in the market this way than in PVP! Ironically, the one thing I DON’T wanna see while updating orders with Evernus is my wallet flashing. If it flashes it’s prolly because I made a big mistake and I just sold something underpriced. Anyway, even being careless, is a great time saver.

The last tool I use is BY FAR the most important one. It’s a Google Docs spreadsheet with  Steve Ronuken Script (https://github.com/fuzzysteve/eve-googledocs-script/blob/master/EveCentralPrices.gs) script to pull data from EVE Central. This way I can instantly see what Items will provide me a potential profit, at any given time. Not only that I also import my market orders into the spreadsheet, in order to know if I already have that item for sale. Last thing I want is to buy an Item I’ve not sold just yet. Without this tool I would not know as fast if “Item A” would provide a decent profit or if I even have it for sale, and not sure if my strategy would survive.

In fact, I had a previous spreadsheet that did the same, but was based in the ImportXML function. Google Docs internal changes made it impossible to pull data from EVE Central and broke that tool, not only for me but for many other people in the forums complaining about it. Fortunately I stumbled upon Steve Ronuken script, had to read tutorials about how to use Google scripts, and it been working flawlessly ever since! My biggest appreciations to Steve.

Pretty sure that there are more tools, but these are the ones that keep me going and save me the most time, while providing instantly the information I care about.