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 January my net worth was up 50 billion after expenses.
For a change, this month I increased the amount of time I spent working the market. I spent 2-3 hours a day on all but a few days this month. 3 times as much work for less than 50% increased profit. That's pretty harsh diminishing returns on time spent.
Once you get big enough spending more time working the market has diminishing returns, the more hours spent at it, the less you make per hour.
Next month I'll probably go back to spending less time (an hour a day at the most) and working longer term trends again
Current net worth is 432 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 talking about profit made before expenses, adding that up as a running total and only mentioning expenses as an afterthought. My numbers are (and have always been) my actual current net worth after expenses.
"For a change, this month I increased the amount of time I spent working the market. I spent 2-3 hours a day on all but a few days this month. 3 times as much work for less than 50% increased profit. That's pretty harsh diminishing returns on time spent."
ReplyDeleteThat's what all the 0.01 ISK'ers don't get. To quote myself:
The average income per hour of a mission runner is constant in time during the day. This is in contrast with the income of a trader. For example, run some missions for n hours during some day. At the end, assuming X to be your income per hour, you’ll get n*X. For a trader this doesn't hold. You’ll always get (n-S(n))*X, where S(n) is some positive monotonically increasing function of n such that S(x)=0 for all x in [0,1]. What does this mean? It means that the people staying for hours, continuously, updating market orders are morons. Why is that? Because there is a point, given enough time, after which they could be making more ISK by doing something else. With low capital, you shouldn't pass over two hours per day, time that you should distribute in many smaller intervals. With high capital, 30 minutes to one hour is more than enough.
Can't argue with any of that, it's all true but the way I prefer to put it is "Trading scales mostly with capital investment, rather than with time".
DeleteAnd the more capital you have invested the more true that is. While camping and using obsessive 0.01 cuts might help a lot when you count your money in the millions or low billions, it's not nearly as effective once you're into the 10s of billions. By the time you're in the hundreds of billions it really doesn't make enough difference to be worth all the extra effort.
This is the exact opposite of just about every other money maker in the game which all scale mostly with time... Spending more ISK isn't going to help a miner, PI farmer, or Industrialist nearly as much as spending more time will.
I prefer velocity as my metric. Granted, last month suked for me, but I find if you can move it quicker, the returns happen faster. Once you get higher levels of capital, you can obviously wait a little longer to sell your batches (because things only move so fast, even in Jita) which doesn't have you fighting in the daily ebbs and flows, but longer term trends, but if you're turning over everythiing once a week, it does better. Though it's hard to turnover 400bn a week, which is why I find the returns to be diminishiing as you get more successful anyways.
DeleteThen again, you can always just use more alts.
At lower capital levels quick turnover and reinvestment of capital works great. I recommend that in a lot of my earlier posts. At high capital levels you run into plateaus where you can't really turn it over any quicker *and make significantly more ISK.
DeleteMore alts take more time. The more alts you have the less time you can spend on each individual alt's orders. Having a lot of alts has definitely pushed me more towards working longer term trends (and higher volume orders).
I'm at the point now where the biggest problem I keep running into is having lots of newly purchased stock to post for sale but I just don't have the time to get around to picking up, transporting and posting all of it quickly anymore. So I tend to just do a couple characters at a time and let everything pile up on the rest until there's enough (a couple billion at least) to make worth spending some time on.
mox...how far have u trained your alts? to wholesale 5 +? what id like to know is how do you keep track of everything? how often do you update your orders against competition price increase/drops? you must be the god of organization.....
ReplyDeleteAll my trade alts either have Tycoon V, Trade V, Broker Relations V, Accounting V, Margin Trading V, Marketing V, Daytrading V, Contracting IV, Procurement IV and Visibility IV or are in the process of training those skills.
DeleteI try to update my best selling items, particularly on the best performing alts once a day but I don't always have the time for that. The rest get updated infrequently.
For the most part it's as buy orders get filled, I post it to sell orders and put up new buy orders to buy more of those items.
I'm curious .. When you long on your characters to manage your trading, so you have a sso (script) to do so or do you manually tap in all the info for every character?
ReplyDeleteI guess i'd like to see a piece on strategtically managing that many accounts some time.
I do it all manually.
DeleteThe strategy is pretty simple. Concentrate on the best items and most profitable characters. Do them first and don't worry about the rest until they have enough stock sitting in assets to make it worth your time.
Usually that's 5 or so characters and maybe 6 items. I'm not updating all (not even close) orders on those characters and I'm not updating the 6 or so items on every character either so I can do all that in about half an hour.
If I spend more time at it I can do more characters and/or more items.
I'll do a lot of other things infrequently too. Things like spending an hour or two updating all orders on a couple characters. Or an hour or two updating a specific subset of 20-50 orders on most of my traders.
Or doing a milk run where I load up a blockade runner put it on autopilot and transfer stuff between hubs. A long milk run might take all day to finish but it's mostly afk time on autopilot, actual time at the keyboard is maybe half an hour in total.
The key is doing the most important, most profitable things first and letting the less important/profitable things wait until later when hopefully they'll be more profitable again.
Which characters and items need to be done first changes quite often though some characters and some items tend to be worth doing first more often than others.
Epic results Mox, now let's see a Trillion before year end!
ReplyDeleteThat probably won't happen. As things stand now I'd have to spend 2-3 hours a day every day for the rest of the year to do it and that's not gonna happen.
DeleteThen again you never know, I'm always tweaking things, maybe that'll do the trick!