May Financial Report

Posted: 2012-05-29 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline, market | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

tl;dr Charts

Things are going great!

May Challenges

Since I missed my April update, this report will contain some events from April.

Overall the Inferno patch cycle brought a large amount of change in the form of market speculation:

Drone mineral drops were removed, market and macro bots were banned, RMT was again cracked down on, Vanguard sites were nerfed, Technetium prices were controlled, faction/deadspace/officer items were added to the market, Nocxium’s artifical price ceiling was removed, and datacores were moved to Faction Warfare. Whew.

All these changes combined with the Burn Jita and Hulkageddon V event meant that prices were volatile.

Major Points

I have joined TEST and have been working with their market division, which seems to be a perfect fit for me. TEST has a very savvy development group that has no trouble coding up sites to manage our efforts.

In April at a Eve meetup, I met another trader who mainly operates in the North with an operation about 8x my size. It was a lot of fun to talk shop with another trader. I think we bored the PVP’ers while we rambled on about margins, hauling, bulk orders, and general logistics. I have apparently made a name for myself because she said, “oh you’re the Blake I’ve heard about — yes, I know about you.”

Order highlighting has improved the speed and accuracy at which I can update orders. I spend about 20 minutes a day total broken into two sessions updating prices. I tend to update after downtime and around 23:00, which is US prime.

Stats @CCP_Diagoras Style

172,592,790,045 sold so far in 2012.
35,912,308,945 profit so far in 2012.
12,340 transactions so far in 2012.
2,921,500.42 average profit per transaction in 2012.
10,843,867.01 standard deviation per transaction in 2012.
Top item by quantity was Tritanium with 90,272,146 sold for a profit of 306,018,174.
Worst profitable item was 1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I where I lost 49,869,884.
Best trading day on May 5th with a total profit of 1.24 B beating out Oct 24, 2011 at 793 M when I sold a Jump Freighter I build from scratch.

The Future

Keep doing what I am doing and keep putting liquid ISK back into the market.

I spent some money and picked up 305 Tech 3 Subsystem BPCs. The return isn’t that high, so I might put this project off for a later date or work with a production partner to complete the batch.

The addition of officer/deadspace/faction items has opened up new area of trading. I have been having good success with these and am slowing building my list of items to watch.

New modules are almost always insanely profitable. The addition of the new Inferno modules have so far proven to be very lucrative.

Vanguard Incursion Farming

Posted: 2012-01-20 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline, screenshot, ships | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

For an excellent guide on the methods for running Incursions, review Jester’s Introduction to Incursions Part 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Given that I have Logistics V, Caldari Cruiser V, Shield/Energy Emission Systems V, and Multitasking IV, I found my way into an Incursion fleet running a Basilisk for a Shield fleet. I had Monday off and took the time to grind out Vanguard sites for stupid amounts of ISK. Our average was a little low due to members changing ships, but we still managed to pull in 93 M/hour.

My impressions of Incursions sites is that they are very formulaic. As a Logistics pilot, here are the steps to complete a Vanguard site in 4-6 minutes if you have the proper fleet composition:

  1. Get on voice comms. This is so you can talk about how easy Vanguard sites are and how rich you are becoming every 4-6 minutes. In actuality, you will use voice comms to yell at Logistic pilots if they are not paying attention or if someone deviated from the prescribed kill order and triggered the next wave.
  2. Anchor warps in to the site first which is usually your FC.
  3. Everyone else warps in, lands.
  4. Orbit the Anchor at 5,000 and lock up all your friends.
  5. Watch to see who got aggression first and start repping them.
  6. Before the site is finished, the FC will post an align to the next site. Active align.
  7. Site ends and rats despawn, fleetwarp to the next one.
  8. Go to step 2 and repeat.

I do agree that a change should be made to the risk/reward of Vanguard sites. Different waves, site types, and perhaps lengthening the time it takes for Vanguard sites seem reasonable in order to increase the amount of effort for the ISK.