Friday 24 January 2014

Mailbag - Market Mistake

Re: Re: Market mistake
From: Name Removed
Sent: 2014.01.21 09:27
To: My Tradealt,

Thank you very much. Indeed noteworthy and rare to find players with your attitude. It's experiences like this that makes me want to keep on playing this game.

Yours faithfully
Name Removed

--------------------------------
Re: Market mistake
From: My Tradealt
Sent: 2014.01.21 08:34
To: Name Removed,

Fair enough.

I hate the way the market does that braindead crap and since you asked so nicely I sent you another 74.85 mil.

--------------------------------
Market mistake
From: Name Removed
Sent: 2014.01.19 13:14
To: My Tradealt,

Greetings

Congratulations on your purchase of the Highwall Mining MX-1005 implant for 150K isk. I was a bit too quick about putting it on the market, and what should have been a 150M sell order became a 150K sell order, automatically filling your buy order of 75M.

I would be extremely happy with any compensation for my mistake, hoping that you would pay at least the remaining 74,850,000 isk of your buy order. I'm crossing my fingers, and hoping for the best.

Fly safe.

Yours faithfully
Name Removed

Tuesday 21 January 2014

A Titanic Deal = A Great Day

When I fired up jEveAssets today I was surprised to see my net worth had gone up by 7 or 8 billion overnight. One character had over 7.7 billion in assets, around 6 billion more than he'd had less than 12 hours earlier. WTH?



So I checked the transactions log in game and found this.


Sweet, not only did I buy a bunch of +5 implants at nice prices, I got a titan book for only 6 million ISK or a bit more than 1/1000th of what they sell for. I'll make close to half a billion on the implants and nearly 5.5 billion on the book.

6 billion in profit on a single character makes for a great day!

Friday 17 January 2014

Regional Market Rankings Update - Jan 2014

In November of last year I posted a list Ranking Regional Markets in Empire Space. Since then I've found having a ranked list of empire regions sorted by total market size is incredibly useful for a variety of reasons.

Since that list was compiled a few regions have become busier while others have become less busy so I've updated my list.

All data was pulled from eve-marketdata.com station ranking lists on Friday Jan 17 2014.

The Forge 143,908 orders 30,769,716,463,253 ISK
Domain 72,514 orders 7,900,220,744,514 ISK
Sinq Laison 60,595 orders 4,955,938,856,290 ISK
Heimatar 50,560 orders 4,385,403,986,019 ISK
Metropolis 46,152 orders 3,544,407,625,690 ISK
Lonetrek 43,161 orders 2,807,163,747,878 ISK
Essence 33,955 orders 2,219,897,092,873 ISK
The Citadel 30,287 orders 2,097,881,608,667 ISK

Placid 24,600 orders 1,501,879,821,111 ISK
Tash-Murkon 21,147 orders 1,396,690,947,187 ISK
Derelik 17,438 orders 1,158,290,756,358 ISK
Khanid 12,630 orders 1,081,642,392,500 ISK
Black Rise 15,800 orders 1,077,269,742,466 ISK

Genesis 17,954 orders 908,164,532,910  ISK
Everyshore 16,681 orders 901,394,452,76 ISK
Verge Vendor 20,366 orders 888,225,237,601 ISK
Kador 12,134 orders 626,051,065,007 ISK
Kor-Azor 10,350 orders 631,657,062,927 ISK
Devoid 9,231 orders 679,609,057,998 ISK

Molden Heath 10,000 orders 528,071,813,608 ISK
The Bleak Lands 6,569 orders 352,359,818,669 ISK
Aridia 5,152 orders 301,100,809,519 ISK
Solitude 6,371 orders 281,543,692,117 ISK

Note the bottom 4 plus Placid and Black Rise are all regions composed of mostly low sec systems and where the primary activity is PvP.

The big movers were Placid and Genesis moving up the list with growing markets. Genesis in particular saw growth of over 200 billion with most of the new business on Apanake which has very quickly grown from a sleepy little backwater mission hub into the most active mission hub and biggest market hub in the region.

I think it'd be great if eve-marketdata would put up a new page that automatically generates a list like this with options to show empire regions, non-empire regions, or both.

Don't forget Death Race 2014 - The only good goon is a dead goon starts monday. Feel free to help advertise this event and spread the word by linking that post in game, on your own blogs, on Reddit, Facebook or anywhere that might help increase turnout.

Thursday 16 January 2014

Quick Turnaround Trade

Gotta like those quick turnaround trades, especially when there are nice profits involved.


Less than 2 hours from buying to selling for an easy 80 million ISK profit. Actually less time than that. I'm not sure exactly how much less but it was definitely less than an hour after I logged in and posted them for sale.

Just goes to show why you should post things for sale at reasonable prices rather than trying to gouge too much. Other Cranes posted for sale in the region were around 150 million (very high compared to prices elsewhere) and have just been sitting for a long time, NOT selling. Yet my 2 posted at a slightly higher than normal but still reasonable price sold very quickly.

Death Race 2014 - Starts Monday Jan 20th

The only good goon is a dead goon!

Let's kill some goons!

Death Race 2014 is a week long event, running from noon Monday Jan 20th until noon Monday Jan 27th.

Death Race 2014 is a race from EC-P8R to VFK-IV with lots of fun killing goons along the way. EC-P8R is the most notorious (practically permanently manned) gate camp in the game, a high to null gateway on a high traffic route to goonswarm's home system of VFK-IV where their capital VFK-IV VI (aka Mittanigrad) is located..

Prizes

1st place - 2 billion ISK
2nd place - 1 billion ISK
3rd place - 1 billion ISK

4th place 1 PLEX
5th place 1 PLEX

Prizes will be mailed in game to the winners.

Race Rules

There are no entry fees.
Anyone may enter. Even goons killing other goons!
All times are in server time.

For the purposes of this race "goon" is defined as any member of a corporation in the GoonSwarm Federation alliance.
In order to claim a kill you must have the final blow. If anyone else gets the final blow it's his kill, not your's.
All kills and killmail values must be API verified with killmail links provided by participants.

The contest will run for 1 full week. From noon Mon Jan 20 until noon Mon Jan 27.
Participants may make multiple runs during that week and enter each run into the contest, however each character is only eligible to win one prize.

To qualify for the race and start a run you must kill a ship or pod in EC-P8R. Any kill counts, it doesn't have to be a goon, though it won't count for points unless it is a goon.

Once you have your qualifying kill you have 24 hours to collect points killing goons.
To finish the race you must kill your last ship or pod in VFK-IV. Again, any kill counts as a finishing kill, but in order to score points it must be a goon.

Points will be scored as follows

For every full hour (partial hours do not count) less than 24 hours it takes you to finish the race you will receive 1 point.
For every goon ship kill you will receive 1 point.
For every goon pod kill you will receive 1 point.

For both ship and pod kills you will receive 1 additional point for every full 100 million ISK in killmail value (calculated for each individual kill, NOT as a combined total). Killmails for 99,999,999.99 ISK or less are worth no additional points, 100,000,000.00 to 199,999,999.99 ISK are worth 1 additional point, 200,000,000.00 to 299,999,999.99 are worth 2 additional points and so on.

Non goon kills may be counted as qualifying or finishing kills but do not count for points.
Only killing goons counts for points.

If you do not finish your run with a kill in VFK-IV VI, you will be deemed having failed to complete the race and will be ineligible for prizes.

In the event that it takes you more than 24 hours to get a finishing kill in VFK-IV, late kills will count for the purpose of finishing the race, however no kills more than 24 hours after the initial qualifying kill (in EC-P8R) will count for points.

Multiple kills in the starting and finishing systems are fine. It's completely up to you which ones you wish to designate as the first (qualifying) and last (finishing) kills.

You may not score points for any goon kills made after the time of your finishing kill.
Nor may you score points for any goon kills made more than 24 hours after your initial qualifying kill. This includes late finishing kills (which will count as finishing kills but will not score points).

Entering and Scoring your Runs

To enter simply post a comment here in this article with the results of your run, complete with scoring math and links to API verified killmails. You are responsible for scoring your own run. After the contest is over scores will be double checked beginning with the highest score submitted and working downwards until the winners have been determined.

Runs started before noon Monday 20 Jan are not eligible for entry.
Scoring ends on Monday Jan 27th at noon. Kills made after noon will not count for points, however finishing kills up to 6 hours later will be accepted.

It is possible some scoring mistakes will be made and scores will be adjusted accordingly, however any entries riddled with mistakes will be invalidated and thrown out.

In addition, if you submit a run where you repeatedly kill the same goon (especially if he's always in a rookie ship or pod) over and over, or something along those lines, don't be surprised if your run gets tossed out too.

Participants are encouraged to check scores too, to help me identify submissions with fake killmails, non goon kills and the like. I'm no expert on that kind of thing so I'd appreciate all the help I can get..

Wednesday 15 January 2014

Goon Hunting Season - Opens Monday

As revealed yesterday Goon Hunting Season will be opening soon. Following a philosophy best expressed as "the only good goon is a dead goon", the overall plan is to sponsor a series of fun contests and events featuring the harassment, griefing and killing of goons.

Hunt goons down, massacre them in bunches and harvest their tears... Anywhere you can find them but especially on their own turf.

The first event to kick off Goon Hunting Season will be Death Race 2014, a week full of races from EC-P8R to VFK-IV. In the spirit of the old Death Race movies a big part of the race will be collecting bonus points by killing bystanders, only this time they'll be goons rather than innocents.

Prizes are guaranteed to be worth at least 5 billion in total. If the turnout is exceptional the prize pool may be increased.

Opening day will be on Monday the 20th of January 2014. Complete rules for the race will be posted before then.

Feel free to spread the word and help ensure a good turnout with as many showing up to kill goons as possible.

Tuesday 14 January 2014

Goon Hunting Season Opening Soon

I've been planning on doing some kind of contest or event involving killing goons for quite a long while. I had several different ideas and I've been pondering a couple of the best for months trying to make up my mind which to do. The biggest problem was keeping things simple enough it wouldn't take up too much of my time to organize and run.

In the end I was down to 2 different plans, one involving a wardec corporation but Gevlon's basically just done that so that's out now, leaving the other plan... A series of contests and events revolving around the common theme of killing, griefing, annoying and just generally making things more difficult for goons.

Goon Hunting Season will be kicking off soon with a fun filled week long event. There'll be plenty of incentive to massacre goons and billions in prizes for the killers!

Check back here over the next couple days for more information.

Tuesday 7 January 2014

Optimized Trading vs Trading Your Own Way

Sugar, over at Lowsec Lifestyle has a thought provoking article about Losing Money, mostly due to not optimizing things. That got me thinking about a number of points I've been wanting to write about for a long time and gave me an idea (finally!) how to tie them all into one post.

I agree that not optimizing everything isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm also a firm believer that as a trader doing things differently than most is far better than following the herd and bleating the "undercut by 0.01 ISK to maximize profits" mantra like a good, unimaginative little sheep.

Just for starters, doing things differently makes me less predictable and therefore more difficult for the competition to counter. I don't just mindlessly ship stuff off to wherever some spreadsheet says has the best sell price at the moment. It's often better to send them somewhere else. Just about anywhere else in fact. Somewhere with reasonable sales volumes and a smaller but still nice profit margin. I usually wind up with higher overall profits in the end than I would have made shipping for the highest sell price and winding up fighting over rapidly declining profits with a herd of spreadsheet using no-lifers and bots who all shipped to exactly the same place for exactly the same reasons.

More importantly every minute I don't spend poring over spreadsheets, studying data, grinding station standings and trying to do everything in what the herd blindly accepts as the most perfectly optimal (and therefore the only proper) way to squeeze every single possible 0.01 ISK out of every transaction, is another minute I can spend actually working the market..

Pretty much everything Sugar mentioned in her post are things I do too. Not all of them all the time, but some of them all the time (not worrying about or grinding station standings for one) and all of them at least some of the time.

I often list things, (mostly very commonly used, relatively cheap items like T1/T2 mods and ammo) at or near cost simply to attract players to the station where they then might buy other more expensive items from me that are quite profitable.

When breaking into a new inventory line (items you haven't worked before) prices are often inflated. One of those overly obsessive no-lifers or bots has been buying them ALL out at usual or somewhat more than usual prices and jacked the sell price way up (usually at least 100% higher and often 200-300% or even more).

In that case the best thing to do IMO is to buy one at or near the inflated buy price he's used to crowd everyone else out. Sometimes I get one quick and sometimes it takes a while but once I do get one I can post it for far less than his sell price and still make a very nice profit. If he undercuts that I can go quite a bit lower without losing money and if I have to I'll go right down to cost to break his control. I'll even go lower than cost if I'm sure the reset buy price is going to go down significantly too though I do have to be careful about that. I have to be quite certain he's not manipulating me into selling under cost (I've manipulated others into doing that on occasion myself).

If he doesn't undercut me and someone else buys mine, that's great, I'll just keep buying more in low volume and selling them for nice profits until he finally does react (he almost certainly will eventually).

If he buys me out, even better. I made a nice profit already so I can buy another even if costs a bit more than the last one and post it for a little more too. Keep buying low volume, raising the buy price and lowering the sell price which ultimately forces him to either pay too much for stock in large volumes or let me buy some too. If he keeps on trying to crowd me out by buying it all in spite of rising buy prices he risks buying way too much stock at inflated prices and running into a cash shortage that forces him to either bow out of that market or take big losses dumping stock for a lot less than he paid for it just to get some liquid cash back to play with.

Sometimes having orders delist, or cancelling a bunch of orders and not replacing them for even just a few days can be very useful too. Quite often that results in other traders resetting prices resulting in items that haven't been very profitable in a long time suddenly becoming very profitable. If prices were depressed for a while and you'd been stocking up while prices were down a price reset like that can make you a bundle

Sales performance in regions or stations that haven't been performing very well can usually be improved (sometimes greatly improved) simply by bringing in a good selection of commonly used ship hulls, mods and implants, and selling them at fair prices for the buyer.

Don't just follow the herd! Try doing things differently, as long as it works for you, you like doing it and you aren't hemorrhaging cash, do it your way!

Saturday 4 January 2014

Really Cheap Buzzards

Someone sold me a small stack of extremely (ridiculously, stupidly) cheap Buzzards the other day.


Since I never put buy orders up for 0.01 ISK on anything it's obvious the seller must have been intending to do so himself but accidentally made it a sell order instead of a buy order. My buy order was the highest so he basically wound up giving me 5 buzzards for a grand total of 5 ISK.

I just have to wonder if he sold more than 5 and the person with the next highest buy order got even more for the same price!

Thursday 2 January 2014

Expensive Paste

I was wondering how my net worth suddenly went up by roughly 10 billion overnight. I hadn't made any really big purchases or stock transfers lately, nothing close to 10 billion worth anyhow. Something had to be wrong.

Then I noticed one of my characters had over 18 billion in sell orders when it should have been more like 8 or 9 billion. Checking into that further I found this


I'd posted 474 Nanite Repair Paste at 20.5 million each when I meant to post them for 20.5 thousand each. One thousand times more than intended or about 9.7 billion in total instead of 9.7 million.

The broker fee I paid for this typo was way more than the paste is worth.


There are plenty of reasonably priced ones up too so the chances of someone else mistakenly buying some of them are next to nothing. Another 72 million lost to a silly mistake.

Wednesday 1 January 2014

Financial Report - Dec 2013

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

I buy and sell faction/deadspace/officer mods, ships, skill-books 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 23 active traders, 3 on Jita (one each for mods, implants and skillbooks), 20 more with each covering a different region and a few more in training.

In December my net worth is up 22 billion after expenses. I also sunk another 12 billion into getting all my accounts subscribed 2-3 months in advance (into late Feb or March). Taking that into consideration I actually made 34 billion this month.

Continuing my trend of the last several months, I didn't spend as much time working the market as I used to. I have things down to the point now where I seem to be able to reliably make 30 billion a month with minimal effort (20-30 hours a month posting / updating orders). That's 1 - 1.5 billion per hour and seems to be my sweet spot for optimal ISK/hour.

I find spending more time working the market has diminishing returns, the more hours I spend at it, the less I make per hour. It's often better to just post things at a good price and leave them up until they sell even if it takes a while. I make a bit less but it's a lot less work and I can use the time I do spend on more profitable investments.

I have enough ISK now that I can afford to be patient and work longer term trends. I really don't need quick sales turnarounds and capital reinvestment to keep my income up anymore so I can let a lot of ISK sit idle in buy and sell orders for days or even weeks while waiting for prices to improve.



Current net worth is 382 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. Very little is in assets I don't intend to sell soon, mostly ships and mods I keep in stock for my own use, maybe 4 billion worth and very recently a small stockpile of PLEX worth 5-10 billion.

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 dollars in total.