2011 Trading and Industry Reflection

Overview

Moved my operations completely out of wormhole space and into known space. Attempted to get into the 0.01 fast flip market in Jita and Amarr. My interested in Eve faded over the Summer with the lackluster expansion and Monoclegate sentiments. I eventually expanded into Capital production with the acquisition of Carrier and Capital Part BPOs. Later on in the year I attempted a Invention/T2 production line but ultimately decided it was far too click heavy for the effort.

Profit Summary

The start of the year, I found great market niches and was moving 35-40 B/month to achieve around 7-9 B/month profit. Later on in the year due to personal life commitments and a lack of interest in Eve, I wasn’t logging in as frequently; I found that I was moving about 15-20 B/month in order to turn a 3-4 B/month profit.

Top 30 Items of 2011

The image on the right shows the top 30 items by profit for the last year. This was definitely a breakout year for me as I experimented with the market to find what Ships, Modules, Implants and other items produce the best profit.

#1 Large CCC’s. The best performer as these rigs are used in Capital and Battleships to reduce the Capacitor recharge cycle time.

#2 Capital Shield Transporter I. Producing Capitals in lowsec and keeping these items on the market was a great cross sell.

#3/4 Large Rigs. No surprise here as these are put in every Battleship.

#5 Maelstrom. I was slow to move into the Maelstrom market but after looking at the standard 2011 nullsec Alpha fleet doctrine, I quickly realized that I needed to be trading these heavy hitters — pun intended.

#6 Ishtar. This HAC was a surprise performer for me as they kept getting sold. My theory is that they are great AFK mission ships.

#7/8. Capital ship and the popular module. Easy cross sell like the Shield Transporter.

#9 Noctis. Everyone wants one.

#14 Oxygen Isotopes. I did not make any profits from the GoonSwarm ice interdiction. I was working through a stockpile of about 2-3 M Isotopes before the announcement hit. I was trading all four racial Isotopes but due to the popularity of Gallente towers, Oxygen Isotopes traded better than the other three.

#19 Hulk. Surprisingly a good performer. The majority of Jita flips came in at 5-6 M profit each.

#21 Dominix. The Space Potato is a great mission ship.

#22 Anshar. I wanted to build one as the project was a end-game build for an Industrialist. Details about the build costs and profits can be found in this post.

#26/27/29 Blockade Runners. This item was also a nice discovery once I started trading them.

#30 Dramiel. With the nerf in Crucible, I have seen a slow down in sales.

#12/13/18/20/24/25/28 Implants. People die.

SQL Profit Query

If you have your own wallet table, here is the query I used to pull up the stats for the year. Granted I took the output and made a nice table with it using PHP, but you can easily work with this query.

$sql = ('SELECT typeID, typeName, sum(profit) AS totalProfit, sum(quantity) AS totalVolume
				FROM wallet
				WHERE DATE(transactionDateTime) > DATE_SUB( DATE( :eveDate ), INTERVAL 365
				DAY )
				AND personal = 0
				AND transactionType = "sell"
				GROUP BY typeID
				ORDER BY totalProfit DESC
				LIMIT 30');

2012 Prospects

I’ve found a new, painless method for moving around large amounts of minerals using compression techniques. The new Tier3 Battlecruisers have great market potential not only in the ship hull, but the associated Large guns and modules.

I have been considering shutting down the Capital operation and venturing into different areas. This will move about 20-25 B worth of BPOs into liquid ISK. More spreadsheets are needed to illuminate my path.