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.

Eve Buddy Program!

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







Eve Buddy Program!