I finally PLEX'ed (sort of)

When I started this account, the idea was the same as many others:  I would earn enough to pay for the account with ISK and continue to play each month.  Today, I technically met that goal, with an ISK balance above.   Unfortunately, I was also attempting to meet this goal within my first 30 days, and it actually took me just under 35.

I believe I could have made it under my goal, but I made a few critical errors which hindered my progress.  Firstly, around 9 days ago, after a particularly good weekend of sales, I was looking at a net worth of around 900m.  I had half in cash, and I felt sure that I could get the remainder of my PLEX out of the market with plenty of time to spare.  I was also concerned that I wouldn't be able to get my capital back out of the market quickly enough during the week, so instead of reinvesting, I sat on it.

Of course, with fewer opportunities for sales, my net worth started to plateau off, and I didn't make my goal in time.  Also, LIFE got in the way a little with the holidays, and I missed a couple updates to my orders. 

All in all, I'm pretty happy with this little adventure so far.  I'm only on this character for 15-30 minutes per day, and I've gone from a net worth of around 600k ISK on day 1, to over 600m ISK in cash and a net worth of just over 1b ISK.  Aside from the starter missions, I've not spoken to any agents, so everything is trade related.

Now, to clean out that wallet and get reinvested.  I still have 16 days left on my buddy account to decide if I want to merge this with my other accounts or keep it separate.

Long trips to Jita

This was a long, rainy, cold weekend.  The kind that make you want to spend all morning curled up in bed, followed by a quick peek and sneer outside, then a groggy transition to the couch with a good book for the rest of the day.  At least that's how most of my weekend played out.

I checked in a few times each day to update orders, but I'm finding that the majority of my time is now being spend traveling back and forth to Jita for supply runs.  The weekends have been busy enough that I'm going through my entire stock 3-4 times each weekend, and occasionally I'll need to carry upwards of 200m ISK in a cargohold.  This is making me more and more uneasy, as I know that 100m is the magic number.  I'm flying in relatively non-descript  ships, but eventually I'm going to get popped. So, I've decided to start using a freighter service.

There are 2 large and well known freighter services in New Eden:  Red Frog Freight and Push Interstellar Network (PushX).  Both of these are established and reputable freighter services, and are simply a must if you want to spend you time trading instead of hauling.  I personally have only used PushX for my freight needs, and only for very small loads so far, but I have been very pleased with the results.  In fact, I set up a contract tonight, and my items almost beat me back to the station.

So, now at least, I can autopilot an empty ship back and forth to Jita while I study the market, or while I study something else in another room.  At some point, I'll either need to start up a Jita trade alt on this account, or move to Jita myself

Day 23

Wallet Balance : 12,362,209.47
Assets:               33,376,256.35
Sell Orders:        704,040,633.94

Total =               749,779,099.76 ISK

~32.6mil/day

I've crossed over the PLEX mark with 7 days to spare, now I just have to find a way to liquidate over the next 7 days.  Not taken into account above is the definite and eventual loss to the market, so actual net worth is lower.

More vs More

I fell into what is probably a common trap for a lot of new traders this week when I started moving to higher priced items earlier than necessary.  Here's an example:

Look at that!  2.95m ISK profit in one sale.  That's not too bad, right?  Well, according to the rules I set for myself  its awful!  (~11%)

The moral of the story today is: stick to your plan.  When you pick a margin, stick to your margin.  I have a number of items that I regularly sell for a 55-65% margin.  In that group, I could likely sell 40 of them in 2-3 days.  I got greedy when I thought I was going to get a quick 5-6mil ISK turnaround.  Now, I'm stuck with ~7% of my net worth in an item that isn't moving.  It's actually costing me ISK at this point.  If I had simply stuck to my plan, that 40mil ISK would already be 65+mil now and growing.

Lesson learned.  Remember that open orders and ISK remaining in your wallet are missed opportunities.  My refocused strategy is to try to diversify as much as possible and to attempt to max out my order limit with my liquid ISK daily.  Since I'm not currently using any buy orders, I don't have any ISK tied up in margin.

Here's the progress so far:
Day 17
Wallet Balance : 7,831,545.48
Assets:               55,198,073.89
Sell Orders:        301,105,939.27
Total =               364,135,558.64 ISK

~21mil ISK/day.  


The holiday and some mistakes like the ones above have kept me from doing as well as I had hoped.  If I continue on exactly as I have been I will have enough net value to PLEX, but obviously not enough liquid ISK, so I have some work to do.


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Happy Thanksgiving

Technically its the day after Thanksgiving to all my American friends, but it was a hectic day out of Eve yesterday and I didn't get much of an opportunity to log in.

Regardless of where you are, I encourage you all to take a moment and be thankful of your family and friends, for your health and happiness, and at the very least, the fact that you're able to play this wonderful game called Eve.

Now, back to the regularly scheduled back-stabbing and blatant disregard we're used to.

Ten Days In & Hull Tanking Elite

First things first, CCP made the very nice decision to add Hull Tanking, Elite back into the game as a special commodity.  It's just a little thing, but players put a lot of pride in that particular certificate, so I'm glad it's back.  Check your redeemable items if you qualified for it prior to the implementation of ISIS.

My trading continues to progress at what I think is a good pace..  I'm spending a decent amount of time just looking for profitable trades.  My basic strategy for the past few days is to focus on low volume, 1 to 5 million ISK items with a profit of ~25%.  I update orders about 2-3 times each day, and I make supply runs to Jita about three times a week.

I accidentally spent about a day training Trade V before realizing my time would be better spent in Retail V and then moving on to Wholesale.  Since I trade in a lot of low volume items, I have a very diverse portfolio.  A typical haul back from Jita may include 40-45 items out of my 53 trade slots.  Retail and Wholesale will help open up that particular bottleneck in my process.

Here's a list of my current trade skills.

 <a href="http://imgur.com/B21UbKo"><img src="http://i.imgur.com/B21UbKo.jpg" title="Hosted by imgur.com"/></a>

The plan for the next week will be more of the same:  Slowly increase the value of my individual items while keeping the margin around 25%, and stay on top of my trades in my hub.

Wallet Balance : 30,549,849.43
Assets:               17,898,304.80
Sell Orders:        124,070,770,43
Total =               172,518,924.88 ISK.

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Slower than I had hoped.

I definitely have picked a less than optimal time to begin this trade character.  Had I started a few weeks earlier, then I could have fairly easily cashed in on some of these Rubicon changes.  PI materials related to POCO construction are doing very well, and although I'm doing well in some other projects, beginning trading is a bit slower than I had hoped.  The good news is that with the big boys playing with their billion ISK toys, and the slightly less big boys saving up for them, then maybe(?) it's creating some room down here for me to start my little empire.

Liquid ISK has been a little on the short side, and its been affecting my skill book purchases for personal use.  I'm currently training some miscellaneous ship piloting skills with Trade V at the end.  Hopefully by the time this queue is finished  (~4.5 days), I will have saved enough to purchase Accounting & Marketing.  

I'm holding off on Margin Trading for the moment, as I'm focusing on regional sell orders only.  I've set a 25% profit margin for the time being for any items I sell.  This is because my skills aren't that great yet, so I'm spending a good percentage on taxes and fees, and I'm giving myself some room to compete in these mostly unknown markets.

My strategy so far is to focus on low volume, high margin items, mostly skillbooks and BPOs.  I purchase low quantities of these items and diversify as much as possible.  Out of my total 53 orders, about 45-50 are being used every day.  In a given day, I have been selling about half of my current stock.

I'm logging in about twice each day;  once to update orders in the morning for about 10 minutes, and once in the evening to fly to Jita or surrounding areas for products to sell.   I think my strategy is paying off, only time will tell.

Wallet Balance : 14,253,713.99
Assets:               7,988,482.73
Sell Orders:        59,973,483.34
Total =               82,215,680.06 ISK.

Or about 16.5m ISK/day

Second day progress

I completed training Cybernetics IV today, so hopefully within the next 2-3 days, I'll be able to purchase the Standard implants to get me through the next 50 or so days of training before I need to start paying for this account.

I've had some good progress moving the BPOs and skillbooks I'm trading in.  My biggest problem so far is that I don't have enough open orders to be very effective.  I've trained up Trade III, so only 13 open orders at a time.  Retail and Trade IV are in the queue, so hopefully this limitation will be taken care of tomorrow.

I'm spending the majority of my time attempting to scour the market for future trades while working with my limited budget and open orders.  My current strategy will be to find relatively low volume items in the 500-1000k range with >20% return.  Luckily, its been fairly easy to find items like this, however it's not really making a sustainable amount of ISK/day.

I'm going to begin using jEveAssets to monitor my wealth, as I can't find a good way to do this with spreadsheets:

Wallet Balance : 1,083,096.93
Assets:               7,925,393.24
Sell Orders:      30,649,778.58
Total =  39,658,268.75 ISK.

Day 1

I'm starting this blog for a couple of reasons.  First, after reading some excellent Eve-related blogs over the past few weeks, I think this will be an interesting way to remember the journey that this character embarks upon.  Second, as this will be a primarily trading and manufacturing character, this can serve as a record keeping device to manage my ideas, profits/losses, and net worth.

I started this character with the use of a trial account from another account, and then upgraded using a Commissioned Officer pack from Markee Dragon.  The original account used the referral reward to exchange a PLEX, and this character now has 51 days of play time, as well as a Standard Cerebral Accelerator to assist with my training.

I am currently training into Cybernetics IV while I do the starter missions in Jouvulen to gain capital for investing.  After Cybernetics is trained in approximately 1 day 5 hours, I will begin working on some trade skills and hopefully move myself to more appropriate location.

Current ISK = 667,143.67







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