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.