Ranking Regional Markets in Empire Space

It's useful to know the total market size of regions, so here are the 23 regions of empire space sorted both by sovereignty (Caldari, Minmatar, etc) and by market order size for all 23 regions. The sovereignty list is further broken down into which pirates are in the area (helpful for deciding what to buy there). All data (several days old) was pulled from http://eve-marketdata.com/.

Sorted by sovereignty

Caldari Space (Guristas)

The Forge 130,443 orders 30,137,310,597,270 ISK
Lonetrek 40,992 orders 2,835,952,919,398 ISK
The Citadel 29,557 orders 2,108,965,930,169 ISK
Black Rise 14,669 orders 923,661,026,698 ISK

Minmatar Space (Angels)

Heimatar 47,912 orders 4,249,919,677,100 ISK
Metropolis 43,157 orders 3,412,777,388,159 ISK
Molden Heath 10,543 orders 589,852,832,717 ISK

Gallente Space (Serpentis)

Sinq Laison 54,149 orders 4,842,811,416,077 ISK
Essence 33,756 orders 2,155,119,081,662 ISK
Placid 23,634 orders 1,388,225,291,147 ISK
Everyshore 15,663 orders 899,629,938,222 ISK
Verge Vendor 20,012 orders 881,916,332,290 ISK
Solitude 6,107 orders 284,916,819,863 ISK

Amarr Space (Sanshas)

Domain 67,709 orders 7,884,414,092,573 ISK
Tash-Murkon 21,251 orders 1,424,221,181,822 ISK
Derelik 18,960 orders 1,252,071,888,805 ISK
Devoid 9,516 orders 664,747,633,607 ISK

Amarr Space (Blood Raiders)

Khanid 13,724 orders 1,101,590,959,464 ISK
Genesis 14,121 orders 700,858,157,625 ISK
Kor-Azor 11,339 orders 668,413,268,198 ISK
Kador 13,197 orders 680,114,499,773 ISK
The Bleak Lands 6,478 orders 368,640,361,594 ISK
Aridia 4,410 orders 325,079,022,907 ISK

Sorted by total sell order value

The Forge 130,443 orders 30,137,310,597,270 ISK
Domain 67,709 orders 7,884,414,092,573 ISK
Sinq Laison 54,149 orders 4,842,811,416,077 ISK
Heimatar 47,912 orders 4,249,919,677,100 ISK
Metropolis 43,157 orders 3,412,777,388,159 ISK
Lonetrek 40,992 orders 2,835,952,919,398 ISK
Essence 33,756 orders 2,155,119,081,662 ISK
The Citadel 29,557 orders 2,108,965,930,169 ISK

Tash-Murkon 21,251 orders 1,424,221,181,822 ISK
Placid 23,634 orders 1,388,225,291,147 ISK
Derelik 18,960 orders 1,252,071,888,805 ISK
Khanid 13,724 orders 1,101,590,959,464 ISK

Black Rise 14,669 orders 923,661,026,698 ISK
Everyshore 15,663 orders 899,629,938,222 ISK
Verge Vendor 20,012 orders 881,916,332,290 ISK
Genesis 14,121 orders 700,858,157,625 ISK
Kador 13,197 orders 680,114,499,773 ISK
Kor-Azor 11,339 orders 668,413,268,198 ISK
Devoid 9,516 orders 664,747,633,607 ISK

Molden Heath 10,543 orders 589,852,832,717 ISK
The Bleak Lands 6,478 orders 368,640,361,594 ISK
Aridia 4,410 orders 325,079,022,907 ISK
Solitude 6,107 orders 284,916,819,863 ISK

The bottom four + Placid and Black Rise are primarily PvP markets. This doesn't necessarily mean PvP is bad for business, it just means business is riskier in PvP areas.

I've always said Lonetrek is one of the best trading regions in the game. This list backs me up on that. Not only is Lonetrek tops among regions without a main hub but if you subtract the numbers for the main hubs themselves from the numbers for their regions, Lonetrek is ahead of the main hub regions too, even beating out The Forge (Jita region) by a few hundred million.

Grey Cup Prediction

Tonight is the Grey Cup Game with the Saskatchewan Roughriders vs the Hamilton Tiger Cats. For those of you wondering "What's a Grey Cup?", it's the trophy presented to the winner of the championship game (Grey Cup Game) of the Canadian Football League (CFL).

That's football (not soccer), as in similar to American Football with some different rules that make for a more exciting game. A longer, wider field with bigger end-zones, an extra player on the field for each team, motion being allowed in the backfield before the snap and only having 3 downs instead of 4 are the big differences.

The Tigercats are a good team but the Riders are just too strong right now. They're healthy with no serious injuries incurred while getting out of the semi-finals and finals in the strong West Division. They have a good offence (one of the best) and a great defense (the best).

It's a great team (the best in the league) out of the strong West Division (with 3 teams better than any team in the East) against a good team from the weak East Division.

They've done the hard part already beating BC and Calgary to get out of the West, beating Hamilton is just a formality.

I'm predicting a Riders win by at least 14 points.

New Major Secondary Hub - Or Not?

Right after Rubicon dropped Hageken in Lonetrek suddenly jumped from 20th place to first place on EveMarketData's regional station ranking list. The number of orders remained about the same but the value of the orders rose by nearly 8 times.

Naturally I was curious what was going on.

Did Hageken actually become the largest hub in the region overnight?
Did it have anything to do with the new Customs Offices and/or PI market manipulation?
Did someone buyout a bunch of stuff on the station and relist it for 10x more?

Or what?

After spending a few minutes going through the evemarketdata list I found a single item listed as "Unknown Type" priced for "sale" at 150 billion ISK.

That explains it. Hageken didn't suddenly become the largest hub in Lonetrek overnight. It's probably just one of the new items extremely overpriced at 1000 times or more over it's real value. Maybe a Stratios he's hoping someone who actually has 150 billion in cash on a single character (I don't) will misread and think is priced at 150 million?

There is someone in Lonetrek who likes pricing a lot of things at 10-100 times the usual going rate. For example he really likes posting stacks of Connections (Security, Mining and Distribution) books on Sobaseki for 290-300 million each which is roughly 10x the usual going rate in sell orders.

Or maybe it was just an expensive mistake, the posting fee was probably a billion or more (1.125 billion at 0.75%).

A quick update on the PLEX market venture, here's one day's worth of business.

It was a pretty good day for buying PLEX. I bought another 10 the next day too.

$12,688.20

Just fooling around today doing some simple math based on my net worth I came up with the following:

I have 350 billion ISK and 12 accounts

With PLEX at 550 mil each, 350 billion / 550 million is enough for 636 months worth of account subscriptions.

With 12 accounts, 636 / 12 = 53, enough to sub one account for 53 years or all of my accounts for 53 months (nearly 4.5 years).

If one were to pay real money for 636 months of subscription time at $19.95 per month it would cost $12,688.20

My accounts are worth more than I thought, maybe I should start playing this game seriously!

Pyfa v 1.1.17 - Rubicon Version

It's been difficult finding download links for Pyfa for quite a while. I posted a link to a new version with data for the SoE ships a few days ago and got a ton of hits from people looking for that so here are some more links to the even newer v1.1.17 for Rubicon.

The first two links are to the most recent versions (at the time of this post) for Windows and Mac.

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/Kadesh/pyfa-1.1.17-rubicon-1.0-win.zip (for Windows)
http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/Kadesh/pyfa-1.1.17-rubicon-1.0-mac.zip (for Mac)

The next link is to Kadesh's full list of downloadable files on eve-files.com which has links to the latest version of Pyfa, older versions and some other stuff too. Check this link in the future for more recent versions.

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/Kadesh/

And a Github link

https://github.com/DarkFenX/Pyfa/releases

And here's a link to the Pyfa for Rubicon release post on the official Eve Online forums

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=247609

I have noticed at least one Pyfa error related to the warp speed changes. On Prowlers the warp speed calculation is still using the old values. I haven't checked any other ships, but there are probably others (maybe all ships) with the same problem.

On another note, I have to say the warp speed changes have not disappointed. They're every bit as awesome on Prowlers as I expected. On frigates (Vigils with 3 Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizers) they're even better than I expected!

Rubicon Tomorrow!

Tomorrow is the day we've been waiting for. The day Rubicon finally lands. Everyone's talking about the Sisters of Eve ships, the new COCOs and other deployables but there's not a whole lot out there about the rest of the changes.

While there hasn't been much talk about it, IMO the change that will have the biggest impact on how the game is played and the one I've been looking forward to the most is the Warp Speed Changes.

Make no mistake, the warp speed changes are going to have a profound effect on everything from the ships we fly while soloing to fleet composition, strategy and tactics. Smaller, faster ships are going to become even more popular and Battleships will just be bricks with guns that nobody wants to fly very far in.

Interceptors will be extremely popular. EW frigates are getting some serious buffs too but IMO they'll be overshadowed by interceptors. What it boils down to is most players are going to want to fly interceptors rather than EW ships.

The new POCOs, make that COCOs since they're really Corporation assets, should make for some interesting times in high sec as various PvP entities fight for control over them. Especially near the main market hubs and Jita in particular. RvB and Eve University have both been rumored to have big plans along those lines and you can expect a number of the big null sec corps and alliances to get involved too. Interesting times to be sure.

It'll be interesting to see how RHMLs work out too. They sound great in theory and would likely be quite popular on battleships except battleships themselves are probably going to be less popular due to increased warp times. I can see them being useful on Black Ops battleships and maybe in capital fleets as an anti cruiser/BC screen too.

Rhavas has a comprehensive article on the Rubicon changes over at Interstellar Privateer. His writeup is extremely good, a must read if you're at all interested in the Rubicon changes.

I'm probably a little biased with this next one since I like Prowlers so much but I liked Nosy's article on Prowlers in Rubicon too.

Pyfa for SoE ships

For Pyfa users looking for a version with the new SoE ships and other changes on Singularity, here's a link for you

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/Kadesh/pyfa-singularity-621408-win.zip

Just in case anyone's wondering what Pyfa is, it's a ship fitting tool (Python Fitting Assistant).

Rubicon release update: You'll find a bunch of links to the Rubicon version here

http://merchantmonarchy.blogspot.ca/2013/11/pyfa-v-1117-rubicon-version.html

PLEX Market - 13-11-2013

Just another quick update on my PLEX market venture.

I'm starting to use the PLEX market as a general indicator of market movement and a pretty good barometer of how lively the overall market is in the area. When PLEX sell in a particular region it often means a bunch of other stuff sells soon after.

The more PLEX move, the more players are around and the more ISK is being spent.

In the slower regions I find if PLEX move in decent numbers over time, most other things will move eventually too. If PLEX aren't moving very much at all that seems to indicate there aren't many players or much ISK being spent in the area at all and other things don't sell very well either.

Which leads to a new rule of thumb for me. If PLEX move ok, so will just about anything else.

PLEX Blunder

Another larger than expected profit due to some poor buyer's mistake and CCP's ass-backwards order filling logic.

He must've entered a buy order, probably intended to be for 580 mil each, but mis-typed and wound up paying 200 mil extra (100 mil each). The going price for PLEX sell orders in the region was barely over 600 million (I sold 2 others to someone else less than 1 minute earlier for 602.9 mil each).

No sell orders in the region were priced as high as this guy paid, even the highest priced one in the entire region was more than 40 mil less.

Bombless Bombers - The Solo Hunter

Some players think bombless bombers are a big joke but they do have their uses.

For example they make nice solo hunters in low/null/wh space, providing good dps and covert stealth at a low cost. Here's a manticore setup for hunting industrials. It can take out a lot of other ships that aren't too heavily tanked too.

The target painter and rigs pretty much guarantee full damage vs Industrials and increase damage application vs smaller targets too. The EM Ward Amplifier is really just a placeholder. It can be replaced with a cheaper, lower meta version, an AB for dual prop, a shield extender for a bit more tank, a sebo for faster targeting or whatever you like.

This post was inspired by a Hound Fit posted elsewhere. It was so similar to one of my Manticore fits I thought I'd post my fit for comparison. Both have the same dps and volley damage, the difference is the Manticore has an extra mid slot and the Hound has an extra low slot, making the Manticore more versatile and the Hound faster (a lot faster actually).

I forgot to put them in the screenshot but the Manticore is with the following implants

Low-grade Snake Alpha
Low-grade Snake Beta
Low-grade Snake Gamma
Low-grade Snake Delta
Low-grade Snake Epsilon
Zainou 'Snapshot' Torpedoes TD-605
Zor's Custom Navigation Hyper-Link
Zainou 'Deadeye' Target Navigation Prediction TN-905
Zainou 'Deadeye' Rapid Launch RL-1005

Without the Snake implants, it goes 1922 m/s (the Hound goes 2433 m/s).

Turkey Shoot in Null

So we just had a CCP organized planned live event turkey shoot in null.

10% TiDi, 20+ jumps, null bloc death trap gatecamps along the way CCP directed players to go and so on.

Anyone with half a clue and two brain cells to rub together could see this coming the minute the event was first announced.

You have to wonder why CCP didn't see it coming. Or maybe they did. Maybe that's what it was really about all along. To lead the clueless, unthinking and overly trusting to a slaughter (theirs) and keep CCP's restless null sec bloc favorites happy with lots of easy kills and plentiful tears delivered to them on a silver platter.

It would have been too easy to simply bridge participants to the event rather than forcing them to endure hours of travel with 10% TiDi just getting there. Or they could have put the entire event in a wormhole on a reinforced server node which would have minimized both the TiDi and the problems caused by griefers and gatecamps.

Regardless of whether it was intentional on CCP's part or not, this "event" was a disaster, a complete, utter failure. Unless of course you take the null bloc perspective, no doubt they consider a clusterfuck of this magnitude a resounding success.

Before some dull witted null troll suggests it, no I'm not crying about it. I did see it coming and declined to participate. A lot of others didn't though, they're screaming about it and justifiably so.

Trade Hub Analysis - November 2013

There are 5 main trade hubs in Eve Online. In order of market size they are, Jita, Amarr, Dodixie, Rens and Hek.

In terms of how profitable they are for me I rank them Jita, Amarr, Dodixie, Hek and Rens.

In order of profit vs time and effort required to make that profit I rank them Hek, Dodixie, Amarr, Jita, Rens.

Top 10 Trade Hubs

The following is a list of the top 10 trade hubs ranked by market value pulled from the "all regions" station ranking list at Eve MarketData

1	Jita IV - Moon 4 - Caldari Navy Assembly Plant	100,265	26,638,220,288,848ISK	View Rank History
2	Amarr VIII (Oris) - Emperor Family Academy	50,917	6,553,472,837,645ISK	View Rank History
3	Dodixie IX - Moon 20 - Federation Navy Assembly Plant	36,169	3,822,492,279,422ISK	View Rank History
4	Rens VI - Moon 8 - Brutor Tribe Treasury	31,104	3,396,734,263,963ISK	View Rank History
5	Hek VIII - Moon 12 - Boundless Creation Factory	22,103	2,429,866,852,989ISK	View Rank History
6	Oursulaert III - Federation Navy Testing Facilities	6,496	823,477,865,437ISK	View Rank History
7	VFK-IV VI - Moon 1 - Mittanigrad	5,461	611,705,630,438ISK	View Rank History
8	Motsu VII - Moon 6 - Caldari Navy Logistic Support	3,689	570,562,427,019ISK	View Rank History
9	Tash-Murkon Prime II - Moon 1 - Kaalakiota Corporation Factory	5,481	529,766,043,636ISK	View Rank History
10	Agil VI - Moon 2 - CONCORD Logistic Support	5,767	510,694,901,963ISK	View Rank History

The 5 main trade hubs stand out due to having much larger markets (both in number of orders and total value of those orders) than the others. The smallest main hub (Hek) is 3 times larger than the next largest market hub (Oursulaert).

Jita

By far the largest of the main trade hubs with a bigger market than all the other main trade hubs combined. Usually has more than twice as many pilots around than all the other main hubs combined too. Far and away the most active of all the major hubs. Too many no-lifers and bots perpetually playing the 0.01 ISK game. Profit margins tend to be slimmer than in other places but if you have enough isk to play with and the patience to deal with the 0.01 ISK campers you can make more total profit through sales volume here than anywhere else.

You'll usually see 1200+ pilots docked and active in Jita, sometimes over 2000.

Jita is good for buying most items in bulk, especially manufactured items. It's also great for finding things you're having trouble finding anywhere else.

Amarr

The second largest market by a fair bit. One of the most consistently profitable and reliably performing markets in my experience. The market is larger and more active than anywhere except Jita. It's not as heavily camped as Jita or Rens either so it takes less effort to make the same isk here. Along with Hek this is one of my favorite markets.

Usually has 150-200 pilots docked and active, 250+ during peak times.

Dodixie

The third largest market. I found Dodixie a very poor performer at first but as I got more isk and more orders to play with it got better. Now it's almost as good as Amarr for me. I guess Dodixie is just a tough market for smaller, newer players to break into but for larger, more established players it's fine.

Usually has 150+ pilots docked and active, 200+ during peak times.

Rens

Fourth largest market by market order value. The least profitable in my experience. Rens is very heavily camped, especially considering it's the second smallest of the major hubs and not much bigger than the smallest (Hek). Even some regions without a major hub are more profitable than Rens and for a whole lot less work too. Definitely, without a doubt, my least favorite main trade hub.

Usually has 100-150 pilots docked and active, 150-200 during peak times.

Hek

Hek is the smallest of the main hubs but often has the best profit margins of the main hubs. This is one of my favorite markets. The market isn't that much smaller than Rens but Hek isn't camped very much at all, meaning you can update orders less often yet still move items in decent volume and for bigger margins than on the other hubs.

Hek is the newest of the major hubs. I've only been playing for a year and a half myself so I'm not sure just exactly how long it's been around but when doing google research Hek is never mentioned as a main trade hub in the older posts. I figure it's been a main hub for 2-3 years now.

Usually has 100 or so pilots docked and active, 150 plus during peak times.

Secondary Hubs

Rounding out the top 10 are:

Oursulaert

VFK-IV VI

Motsu

Tash-Murkon Prime

Agil

I was on Oursulaert for a while but I found the no-lifers and bots camping Ours were even worse than the ones on Rens. So I moved 1 jump over to Renyn and found much better business there.

VFK-IV (Mittanigrad) is in nullsec and I don't have station access so I can't say anything about business there. I find Motsu and Tash are both good for business and though I haven't been on Agil very long yet, so far it's looking good too..

Other secondary hubs of note include:

Sobaseki

Ichoriya

Teonusude

Alentene

Renyn

Kor-Azor Prime
Atlanins

Orvolle

Cistuvaert

Stacmon

Tar
Kamela (low sec)
Solaria Vehan (low sec)
Octanneve
Esescama

The first bunch are ones I've been actively trading on for a while and I'm happy with the business on all of them except Orvolle which is a bit disappointing. But then again it's in a PvP region and my product mix is more PvE oriented, with a more PvP oriented mix business would probably be just fine.

Cistuvaert reminded me so much of Oursulaert I never even tried it (Alentene right next door suits me just fine). Stacmon I was on for a short time but I wasn't happy with the business there so I moved to Orvolle. Business doesn't seem to be any better there.

The last bunch are in regions I have little or no experience in but look to me like the best places to trade from in their regions. I have just placed a new trade alt on Kamela (still needs a lot of training) and plan on expanding to the others eventually too.

Smaller hubs

Besides the 5 main trade hubs there are many smaller hubs. Most of the smaller hubs are mission hubs, FW hubs, industrial centers, systems where miners flock and the like. There is a reason why pilots tend to congregate in these systems. If you figure out why they're there you should have a pretty good idea of what they have to sell and what they need to buy too.

Some of the smaller hubs (listed in no particular order) are Arnon, Aldrat, Osmon, Akainavas, Umokka, Clellinon, Couster, Deepari, Penigrman. Experienced regional traders will recognize many of these systems as places where a lot of their buy orders get filled. They make great places for new traders to get their feet wet before diving into the deep end with the obsessive overly competitive station traders found on the major trade hubs and many of the largest secondary hubs.

Pretty much any system that normally has 20-30 pilots docked and active is a good place to do business. The more pilots around the better, quite a few of these smaller hubs have 50, 60 or more pilots in system during peak times. A handful frequently have those numbers during off peak times and occasionally hit 100 or more during peak times.

IMO, the best way to find trade hubs is going to Eve MarketData and perusing the station rank lists there. You can have it show ranked lists of stations in a solar system, a single region or all regions.

Other methods of finding stations to trade from can be found in this link: Choosing a Trading Station.

Osmon is a bit of a special case, it frequently has 150+ pilots but it's often well under 100 too. Osmon is the major mission hub for level 4 Sister's of Eve agents (the best missions for repairing faction standings) and a major ice mining center notorious for botting operations too. It's not a main trade hub though. It's really not any better than other secondary hubs in spite of it's greater size and activity mainly because it's in the same region as (and quite close to) Jita. There are a lot of items sold on Osmon, the problem is you're buying them in competition with buyers on Jita and there are an awful lot of buyers on Jita.

Bulk hauling supplies mission runners and ice miners need (ammo, modules, even ships) into Osmon to sell is probably quite lucrative.

Certain null sec hubs can also get very busy at times, usually due to being staging points for war operations. When this happens they can rival the best of the smaller hubs. However the busy times tend to be short lived as war fronts move and wars end.

Listing null sec hubs is beyond the scope of this article, however if you find a war staging hub, it'd be a great place to use remote order skills from a cloaked ship to do a little ninja trading (buy up all their cheap war supplies and sell it back to them for big profits). If you're part of the alliance staging out of the system, don't jack prices up on your main, that'll just get you yelled at and possibly kicked.

Hub Clusters

Large secondary trade hubs tend to be clustered together around the main hubs. You can find clusters of several large secondary hubs, spread across multiple regions, all within a few jumps of each other and with one of the main hubs more or less central to the cluster.

Here's a link to a more in-depth post about Trade Hub Clusters.

Market PvP - Taking a loss

Sometimes traders worry too much about making a profit on every single transaction. They'll go to extreme lengths, trying to track the buy price on every single item they ever purchased and sell it at a profit no matter what. They'll cancel orders, buy out cheaper orders and transport items all over the map trying to prevent taking a loss.

It often backfires. The harder they try to avoid taking a loss, the bigger the losses get. For many reasons it's often better to just cut your losses by lowering your price, selling quickly at a small loss and moving on.

Market Adjustments

Sometimes the market just adjusts on it's own without any player manipulation involved. When there haven't been many big fleet battles for a while demand goes down for many items, trader's stockpiles grow and prices drop. When this happens a trader basically has 2 choices:

1. Drop his price and sell it quick (even at a loss) before things get even worse, or

2. Hold onto it waiting for prices to rise again (they usually do eventually).

Option 1 often means not making much profit or taking a loss. The advantage to it is you get your ISK back to reinvest quickly, whether in the same item at a lower price level or in another item with better margins. Normally the sooner you decide to drop something at a loss the smaller the loss is, while the longer you wait the more you tend to lose.

Holding onto items waiting for the price to rise again is fine if you're confident the price will go back up again real soon. Of if you're so rich you couldn't invest all your ISK even if you tried then you really don't care how long the ISK sits idle as long as you make a profit in the end.

Also, it often happens that the longer you wait to dump overstock the bigger the loss is. So not only is your ISK tied up (and not working for you) longer but you lose more in the end. The flip side is the faster you dump it the sooner you can reinvest the ISK and make back any (usually small) losses.

There are exceptions (mostly relatively cheap, high volume items) but in most cases I'd rather take a small loss than hold onto something for too long.

Beating the bots

And then there's player price manipulation, mostly from the no-lifers and bots. Eve has a lot of no-lifers and bots camping the market. They're always there, constantly camping, undercutting everyone else by 0.01 ISK, trying to corner markets and manipulate prices so they get all the sales. The higher the profit margin on a particular item the harder they camp it. Their goal is to gain "control" over the items they camp, drive sell prices sky high, buy prices into the dirt and get all the sales at ridiculous prices with huge profit margins

When moving into new markets I often find there's a bot "controlling" the items I want. I have to buy a few at unreasonably high prices before the bot reacts, prices and margins drop to reasonable levels. The nice part is I can usually sell a few well under his sell price but still at a big profit for me before he decides I'm competition and drops the price. Typically, the bot has it priced at 200-300% profit. I'll post at 100% cutting his profit by half or more. He thinks I'm just a 1 time seller and let's it slide without undercutting me at first. Eventually he realizes he has competition, drops his prices way down and I take small losses on a few before prices settle at more reasonable levels and I start making a profit again..

The thing to remember when that happens is over time he's 0.01 ISKed everyone else out of the market. He's pushed prices up so high and persistently undercut everyone else out of sales for so long that everyone else just gave up. That means he has a large stock that he paid quite a high price for (if buy prices were low other bots would be all over it too).

All you really need to do to break into "his" market is buy a few (sometimes even just one) at high prices, drop the sell price and keep it down. Buy prices will usually drop soon after, the bot won't be able to move his existing stock at a profit and stops trying to buy it all since he can't count on 200%+ profits anymore.

Conclusion

Many times when prices drop it's best to just take a loss, get most of your ISK back and reinvest it. Often in the same item at a lower buy price. So technically you lose on one transaction (or a few) but you make it right back on the next one(s).

PLEX Market - Update III

This is the third in a series of updates on my PLEX market venture which began 8 days ago on Oct 26 when I first started buying PLEX for resale.

I now have buy and sell orders up on several characters in different regions. To date I've bought 35 and sold 12 as shown in the JEveAssets Transactions screenshot below.

Besides the 12 PLEX that were resold another 10 were used to resub accounts, leaving 13 as yet unsold. I'll also need another 6 in about a week to resub more accounts. That leaves 7 more to sell.

I paid an average of 568 mil ISK each for the 35 I bought and sold 12 for an average of 616 mil ISK each. Or about 48.8 mil profit per PLEX sold. Before taxes and fees that is. After taxes and fees of roughly 12 mil each that leaves about 36 mil profit per PLEX or 432 million in total profits.

Assuming the other 7 sell for the same 36 mil after taxes and fees profit, that'd be 684 mil in total profits.

That's over an 8 day period, extrapolated over a full 30 day month, that'd be 2.65 billion per month. Considering I've barely gotten started in the PLEX market I should be able to do considerably better than that. There's still plenty of room left for expansion both in the number of regions I'm working and in the number of PLEX I buy in each region I am working. I haven't transported any PLEX between regions yet either, there's probably more profit to be gleaned that way too.

This is under the worst conditions, while PLEX prices are going down. Once prices stabilize and start going up again, my profit per PLEX might even go up. Note how the first ones I bought, which I paid the most for, also netted the biggest profits (68 mil ISK before taxes and fees on the very first one)

I'll be moving slowly but surely, continuing to increase my presence in the PLEX market until I have it maximized to net me the most profit for the least work.

Spam Referral Sites

I was all excited when I checked my blog's stats today and saw I'd received over 1,000 hits yesterday. "Finally, broke the 1000 hits/day barrier and hit a milestone!", I thought.

Then I checked traffic sources and saw this

Yesterday's referral hits

Most of the hits yesterday weren't hits from real readers, they were just garbage hits from Spam Referral sites. I thought I was finally rid of them a few weeks ago but they suddenly showed up on my stats again today.

I really wish they'd go away and stop messing up everyone's stats like this.

For other bloggers who may not know I'd like to point out that one of the worst things you can do regarding spam referrals is to click the spam referral links on your own stats page. That's exactly what they're looking for, clicks, the more you click on their link, the more garbage hits they send back your way.

The clicks aren't on a 1 to 1 basis either, for every click you do they'll send back hundreds of fake hits.

Financial Report - October 2013

Financial report for the month of October 2013 (last month). Trade oriented since trading is how I make virtually all of my ISK.

I buy and sell skill-books, faction/deadspace/officer mods and implants with traders covering all 5 major trade hubs (Jita, Amarr, Dodixie,  Hek and Rens) plus secondary hubs in most other empire regions. I have 20 traders in total, 3 on Jita, one each for mods, implants and skillbooks, the rest covering 17 different regions.

In October I made over 29 billion after expenses. I spent less time than usual working the market. Pretty decent, considering Oct has been a slow month for sales with prices dropping radically on a number of items.

On the other hand, big price drops and the resulting losses aren't a big problem if you handle it right and act quickly. Just take the hit and lose money on 1, then make ISK on the next 10 bought cheap when most of the competition bails out because prices are low. They're stuck with capital tied up in stock they can't move at a profit and are reluctant to let it go at a loss while it's still just a small loss.

Current net worth is 333 billion with about half in cash and market escrow. Most of the rest is in sell orders and recently acquired stock I haven't gotten around to posting for sale yet.  As I get bigger and spend less time updating individual orders I find myself carrying more and more of my net worth in sell orders. Very little is in assets I don't intend to sell soon, a few ships and some mods I keep in stock for my own use, maybe 4 billion in total.

That's my actual current total net worth, I don't pad the numbers by counting ISK I've earned but have since spent and no longer have. That'd be like calling myself a real life millionaire because I've earned over a million dollars during my life when the reality is I've never had anywhere near a million in total.

Three blog posts in one day, that's a record for me!

Somer of PANIC - 1 Billion "bonus" ISK per GTC

Just when I thought we were about done with the Somerblink RMT scandal Somer has gone into full panic mode and started dumping ISK for dollars as quickly as possible. They've put on a 1 billion "bonus" ISK credit per GTC for purchasing GTCs from them.

I'm not going to repeat what someone else has already said (and said very well) but you can find the dirty details here: Liquidation Sale

In other words, Somer is selling off as much ISK as quickly as they can before the Nov 7th deadline and that definitely changes everything.

Knowing that, now I'd say it's the main reason why the ISK price of PLEX dropped so far so suddenly rather than slowly over time. But let's call a spade a spade, what it all boils down to is Somer and Markee Dragon are selling ISK for $5.00 per billion. How that 5 bucks is split between Somer and their dirtbag partner in crime Markee Dragon nobody else knows.

Expect PLEX prices to continue dropping until the situation is resolved and prices for just about everything else to go up as the sudden influx of large amounts of ISK into the economy drives increased spending and ultimately higher prices. The longer this situation goes unresolved the more profound effect it will have on the economy.

Really CCP, enough is enough, Somer and Markee should both be shut down immediately and permanently for this. They aren't even trying very hard to hide their real business anymore, this is nothing but a blatant RMT cashout!

Apparently Markee has already temporarily run out of GTCs so the solution is really simple. Make it permanent, don't let him have any more GTCs. EVER!

The longer this is allowed to go on the worse the already terrible publicity over it is going to get for CCP. Does CCP really want to be known for being easily manipulated, outmaneuvered and taken advantage of at every turn like this?

The Sky is Falling - PLEX Prices Drop

I've been saying for a while now that PLEX prices would drop soon and it looks like it's finally started. Buy prices have suddenly dropped from 590 - 610 mil to 575 mil or less nearly everywhere. Some of the more off the beaten path regions do still have higher buy prices but only for small numbers. Those will likely disappear quickly, unless I miss my guess, probably overnight.

That's in Hek, right next door in Rens buy prices are even lower. Time to log onto the Rens trader, right now!

PLEX prices historically tend to reach their highest point of the year in October or November and drop after that.

This is contrary to most other markets which (IME during the time I've been playing anyhow) tend to drop in price in the fall and reach their lowest point around the same time.

Over the next while we can expect PLEX prices to drop further and prices for everything else to eventually start going back up.

Many things could be behind this seasonal trend but the most likely culprits are students. Summer vacation ends and they go back to school. Exactly why is more difficult to say.

Some believe it's because with the students back in school they have less time to play. I don't know about that though, from my experience in other games, it's exactly the opposite. Students tend to game the least in the summer when the weather is nice and they're off school.

My theory is it's because as a group students are major suppliers of PLEX on the market (buying with real money and selling for ISK) and big buyers of other items with the ISK. In the summer they aren't playing as much so the supply of PLEX goes down while demand remains relatively high and prices go up. They aren't buying as much of anything else either so demand for everything else goes down while supply remains fairly constant and prices go down.

In late fall, after an initial "settling back into school routine" period both trends start to reverse. Prices for PLEX come down and prices for other things go up.

In both cases the market takes some time to adjust to the presence or absence of students. At the start of summer there are a lot of cheap PLEX on the market which have to sell off before PLEX prices go up. At the start of fall there are a lot of other items on the market for sale cheap, they have to sell off too before prices go up on them. That takes a month or two and only then do prices start to react significantly.

At any rate, it explains why PLEX prices go up in the fall while virtually everything else goes down. If someone has a better theory, I'd love to hear it.