July Financial Report
Posted: 2012-07-29 Filed under: industry, market, screenshot | Tags: bpc, bpo, cobalt, invention, tech 2, tech 3, tengu 6 CommentsOverview
June and July were periods of rapid growth, both in terms of buying power and activity spread. I’m now able to have my fingers in more markets and more item types, helping to spread the risk.
Graphs!
Out performing the liner projection the past three months.
My purchase sprees have grown in volume over the past few months. They keep topping out at larger amounts. 18.5, 21.1, 25.2, and now 25.5 B purchased in a single day. I love seeing the holding account balance go up, but liquid ISK is idle ISK. Throw is back into the market unless you are accruing a balance for a project.
Major Points
1. New milestone reached as I moved 103.7 B ISK this month.
Subscribing to the Bulk Trade mailing list has fueled buying in large quantities. Why buy two Scimitars off the market when you can buy 20 and get a discount?
2. Speculation on Cobalt
I logged into Jita about 35 minutes after the Devblog was posted citing changes to Alchemy. At this time the majority of Cobalt was off the market, so I was only able to get 26k units @ 1,580 (41.7 M) and then I foolishly bought 15k units @ 7,000 (110.7 M).
As of this writing, Cobalt is sitting at 2,800 in Jita so I highly doubt that I was turn a profit on these speculative trades. I didn’t run the numbers after the announcement so I’ll accept the loss on this.
Despite the loss, it was fun to refresh the markets and watch the speculation drive prices. I hope for more changes to the moon market this fall.
This has proven to be a powerful way to remain connected to the market. I’m currently able to monitor sales and purchases. This lets me keep mental notes of what needs to be restocked or adjusted. In the future we hope to expand it with more Android style touch options.
Some ideas that we have been throwing around is that of a cart. If you are about to sell out of an item, it will shade the row and holding down on the row will bring up an action menu. You can look up history, item trading performance, or add the item to a restock cart.
4. Industrial Partner
Raath, the author of Staticmapper and DRK Industry Tracker, and I are forming an industry and trading partnership. I’m taking my idle stack of blueprints and putting them to use.
We’re polishing off our invention and Tech3 production skills so we can start to mass produce ships and modules. *sigh* do you know that it is going to take 50+ days to be able to produce a Tengu hull and Subsystems?
 Idle blueprints |
 Invention skills |
5. Implants
The adjustments to Faction Warfare rewards killed profits on implants for me for over a month. I waited for the price to adjust and am back to trading these in high volumes again. In the past month implants are back in my highest performing group and I’ve moved 2,880 implants in the past 30 days.
6. Wallet Manager
For those of you that have been asking about my Wallet Manager program I have good news. A group of developers is using inspiration from our team and is coding up a public version for everyone. I chat with them daily on irc.coldfront.net and will have a post about this once we have some public-facing content.
The Future
I’m going to get my new partner, Raath, up to speed on the trade operation. He is bringing a large number of production alts so I’m looking forward to putting all our idle blueprints to use.
Technetium Income for Large Alliances
Posted: 2012-07-20 Filed under: market, nullsec | Tags: akita t, budget, dysprosium, goonswarm, neodymium, promethium, technetium, test 2 CommentsIn light of the recent Devblog that outlines changes to moon minerals, I wanted to quantify the scale of income streams that are going to be changing with the Inferno 1.2 patch slated for August release.
Large alliances [in the North] thrive on Technetium income. It pays for ship reimbursements, sovereignty, incentives, and POS fuel. Imagine if you had a 19.3 B/month bill to pay and you could put up a structure to collect valuable goods, a weekly Jump Freighter run to collect the stock from each tower, and a few weekly shipments to market to supply your alliance with billions of ISK per month of income.
If you do some searching, you can find budget sheets for large alliances such as TEST and GoonSwarm. These leaked documents might be a little stale, but can offer us some insight into the scale of income that Technetium contributes to its holders.
TEST Balance, Best Balance
On paper they have 253 B in and 86 B out for a net balance of 167 B per month. Not bad, but consider how much of that income stream comes from moon ownership and then how much of that moon income comes from Technetium.
Feb 2012 Income Sources for TEST
An enormous portion of TEST’s income comes from Technetium. As a younger alliance, I imagine that their holding account doesn’t have nearly as much ISK idle as our older GoonSwarm friend; TEST’s summary page shows 162 days of operating capital.
Scrooge McDuck Money Vault of GoonSwarm
Haven been around for a long time, they have massive amounts of ISK reserved. I’ve been in on a few conversations that have revolved around the GoonSwarm market group and they are working with vast amounts of liquid wealth.
Their budget sheet shows a income of 762 B in and 547 out for a net balance of 215 B per month. Not surprisingly, a large amount of their income comes from Technetium moons.
GoonSwarm Monthly Moon Income
Accidently All the Moons
On paper TEST has 16 Technetium and GoonSwarm have noted 76. So how much of the total nubmer of moons do these two and the rest of the Northern powers control?
There doesn’t seem to be an exact number of moons, only speculation with a high concentration ‘in the North’. Market Forum warrior Akita T has noted that there is somewhere between 360 and 450 moons with a conservative guess around 400. Taking the conservative 400 number means that only 23% is under TEST and GoonSwarm control so there still is a large amount of income not going into these alliance wallets.
Percentage of Items from Invention vs Tech 2 BPOs
Posted: 2012-07-17 Filed under: industry, market | Tags: absolution, bpo, eagle, eris, heretic, hulk, invention, tech 2 4 CommentsA while ago CCP Diagoras posted some statistics on Twitter for the percentage of items that come from Invention vs Tech 2 BPOs to help quell the tinfoil hat theories that Tech 2 BPOs control the entire market. I recorded and sorted the tweets, but never released them.
What does this mean for you as an inventor looking at the market? Well, you will most likely want to stay away from the red items as the Tech 2 BPO owners have a stronger control on the price and can undercut you below your profitability threshold.
If you are interested in further Tech 2 BPO research that I have conducted, take a look at the T2 BPO Returns post.
Jump Freighter Fleet
Posted: 2012-07-14 Filed under: industry, screenshot, ships | Tags: anshar, ark, nomad, rhea 4 Comments
Today we celebrate as we add Jump Freighter #4 to the fleet. This brings our operation to around 1,400,000 m3 of moving capacity per jump.
Prices for these ships have gone nothing but up in the past two years and peaked with the massive amounts of speculation when Drone minerals were removed. The Ark was purchased in 2011-02 at ~4.7 B, which seems almost cheap compared to current prices.
Thrashers in Tama
Posted: 2012-07-10 Filed under: failmail, screenshot, ships | Tags: artillery, autocannon, jita, jonnypew, lowsec, pvp, tama, thrasher 6 CommentsI don’t have a lot of small gang lowsec PVP experience and in order to broaden my experience level, I like to enlist other people to show me the ropes. Sunday night I went on a 2 person Thrasher roam with JonnyPew of the Explorer’s Log Youtube series.
We ended up deciding on Thrashers since they are a versatile and throwaway PVP ship.
I really want a “Copy Ship Fit” option that will take the existing ship’s fit and assemble a duplicate in the same hangar. I only had to fit up 10 Thrashers and I was already getting annoyed. I found that if I put all the modules, ammo, and rigs in to a container and dragged out of that, it helped the mass fit process. I can’t imagine what the RVB people go through to fit up waves of disposable Rifters.
We started in Jita and made our way through Black Rise to Tama under JonnyPew’s guidance. If you don’t know, Tama is a well known PVP lowsec spot so we wanted to end the night there.
On our way to Tama from Jita, we played standoff with a frigate gang and tried to bait a few Faction Warfare people running sites. We ended up not engaging anyone and instead ganked a cyno alt that was waiting out a beacon. Too many times have I been on the receiving end of this action so it was nice to be the one shooting slugs into a helpless ship.
Frigate Standoff
When we got into Tama, we found a solo Thrasher and attempted to bait it. It turns out that my AutoCannon fit was no match for the Artillery off-grid boosted Thrasher.
Our bait went successfully as I warped off to a clearly discernible planet at 30 after locating the solo Thrasher. He landed at 0 on the planet, 30k away, and locked me up. To my amazement he was getting hits on me from 20k away and as I voiced my amazement, JonnyPew informed me that he was most likely Artillery fit. My 1,100 optimal was no match and I went down in under 30 seconds. At least I got a ‘gf’ in local.
gf
Sunday night US (1:00 Monday UTC) seems to be a good block of free time for me. I might try to make this Sunday night suicide roam a regular occurrence. If you are interested in FC’ing or tagging along, contact Blake Armitage in game. Skype conference seems to be the easiest way to communicate for me until I setup an official voice server.
k162space 
