Trading - December 2015 Report

Here goes the December 2015 Report

MARKET PROFITS

 This month was Christmas time and what a time it was for my market profit. I broke every kind of records I’d ever achieved. My previous maximum monthly profit was 10.8 billion  in November 2103, but this month I managed to get, not 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 or 17 but awesome an 18.5 billion profit! Almost twice my usual numbers, so what happened exactly to justify this huge leap?

Not quite sure, but I can speculate.

First of all, my profit was achieved with my usual tactic of resupplying market once per week, before the weekend, and updating order once per 2 days or so. My method did not really change, so it is not the cause of such a great boost on my profits.

The 1^st odd factor I realized while resupplying the market in the beginning of December, was that there were a LOT of shortages. Many items had been totally sold in Hek to the point of depletion. Even niches with lots of competition, like T3 subsystems, had depleted items. This was strange, but welcome. A depleted item on the market means that I can put it for sale at whatever price I want and make stupid amounts of profit. Even when the competition re-enters into play, they may want to milk the cow along with me, and just undercut me by a small value, instead of putting a “fair price”, preventing the price to go down to normal levels.

I took advantage of all the depleted items I could find in my usual item trade list, and put them up for exorbitant prices.

I’d sell 30mil Items for 150mil;

I’d sell 100mil Items for 250mil;

I’d sell 200 mill items for 400mil

…And so on , and so on…

I was really surprised that many many items sold really fast. It came to the point where some items would deplete 15 minutes after putting them in the market, 250mil overpriced!

My theory is that with Christmas came a whole lot of EVE-thirsty players, who were mainly in holidays or vacations, thus having limited time to play and looking at no expenses in order to buy the stuff they wanted. For those players, time, and not Isk, was their most valuable asset.

Still, I don’t believe that an increase of demand alone was responsible for the market shortages. I also believe that many regular everyday traders went AFK, also due to vacations. In fact, when I’m in vacations I play EVE a lot less because it messes up my usual routine, and I use the opportunity to do stuff I cannot do at home. This theory allows me to accept a bit better why many of these item shortages were not addressed by other Hek traders. They were simply not there. I truly don’t know how many guys trade on a daily basis in Hek, but maybe 25 traders going AFK and not doing their market stuff for 15 days is enough for the rest of the hub traders to notice, kinda like I did. Or maybe I’m being clueless here, I dunno…

Whatever it was, my wallet grew fat and I had pretty much the same work as I always do.

PLEX EXPENSES

I spent 2 PLEX to pay my 2 accounts, 1.1 billion each PLEX… All standard here.

BLUEPRINTS

I managed to make around 2 billion Isk profit. Most my profit came from selling researched BPOs and only 2% from selling BPCs. I sold 87 contracts and each contract nets me a profit of around 25 million Isk average.

I’ve continued to do some research on BPO or BPC Sales, and I’ve come to a final decision. In this whole process I truly hate putting stuff up in contracts, therefore, my aim is to get the most possible Isk/contract and avoid boredom. This means that I’ll prefer to sell 1 item per 20 mil instead of 10 items per 2 mil each.

Up until now, I still had the idea of researching some BPOs in a long term fashion, in order to use them to produce BPCs. I researched an Incursus, Vexor and Thorax BPO for that effect. Not only there’s lot of competition in this BPC market, but they sell really low. I can hardly make 1.5 million profit per BPC contract, unless I just put a huge number of BPCs together. Even then, the time and cost to research these BPOS in hi-sec is quite significant. In order to get my initial investment back I’ll have to wait definitely more than 1 year, while dealing with lots of annoying low value contracts over time.

I went to investigate in contract history how other “BPC sellers” fare, and I noticed that many will have pretty much the BPOs for all ships in the game, researched to the max. They will indeed make a good amount of Isk by selling around 5-10 BPCs per day, usually belonging to 2/3 different ships (usually the same buyer will want more than just 1 bpc). Also, the same ship will not be sold every day. They might be able to a couple Caracal BPCs 2 times per week or so, but usually, in order to make good isk, variety is mandatory. This also means that the initial investment is crazy high. A Battleship BPO takes ages to research, or about 2 billion to buy. I’d need to sell more than a thousand BPCs to just make the investment back… the hell with it! As a sidenote, I did purchased a Battleship BPO to resell. I still wondered if I should make some BPCs to try out, but decided against it. I just focused in selling the BPO at a higher value and managed to make 500 mil profit in less than 2 month. More than I’d definitely get trying to sell BPCs during the same period of time.

This being said, I’d like to find some sort of long term endeavor concerning BPOs and such, but something that has not a crazy high initial investment and such small returns. 

HAULING EXPENSES

I kept only using 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 1.5 billion, a bit higher than last month, mostly due to 2 Black Frog contracts to Curse.

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 27 mil profit in T2 BPCs bought from another ex-corp mate. Can’t get rid of those fast enough…

As for buying and reselling capital BPOs I managed to make 710 million profit. Right now I have no Capital nor Battleships BPOS, having sold even the ones that were getting me worried, due to the several times I had to put them on contracts and associated taxes. Putting a 2.5 Bil BPO for sale costs something like 25mil, so after 5 times it has a severe risk to eat away any potential profit.

I have not bought any more Capital and Battleship BPOs because I got lazy (was doing so much Isk with market anyway) and did not searched contracts for good deals. Will probably get back to it in January.

As a funny note, one of my public contracts got suicide ganked. It was hauling 3.8Bil, and I had the collateral set to 4Bil, so I got an instant profit of 200mil. This particular month was more annoying because I was making so much Isk with market stuff and that particular load had several items I could have put for sale at ridiculous prices, but still not terrible.

As a final note, and for those that might be reading this and hating me for making so much Isk this month (at least by my standards), here’s something for ya… I used the opportunity to stock up my ships in Curse. By pure coincidence I happened to mention it to a mate that makes some Jump Freighter runs to Curse, and ended up agreeing with him a cheaper value than Black Frog. Long story short, he messed up and managed to get me 8.5 bil lost… He offered up to pay the stuff over time, but for now, all the extra Isk I managed to make in this market madness kinda got washed away… Easy comes easy goes I guess…