Not Impressed

I've been keeping an eye on the so called Bulk Trade mailing lists for a week now. So far I'm not impressed. Not at all!

Most of the lists seem to be dead with zero messages posted to them.

Only one list (Wholesale Trading) had much traffic. That list seems to be full of sellers spamming cheap junk and "bulk" orders priced over, at or very near normal market sell order prices. I didn't look very closely at the cheap stuff, maybe some of those offers were decent, but with one possible exception none of the more expensive sell offers was worth the time it took to read it.

Why for example would I want to buy Navy Micro Auxillary Power Cores for 4.4 mil each in min lots of 250 when I'm already buying more of them on the market for 3.5 mil and less than I can move quickly? This must be the guy who's been camping the hell out of the Jita Navy MAPC market since the minute they were introduced, frantically trying to corner the market and failing spectacularly. Maybe I should post a couple hundred on Jita for 4 mil each again to correct the price manipulation going on there.

Or then there's the guy selling single (singles on a "bulk" list, go figure!) faction ships for virtually the same price as low volume Jita buy orders and only a few percent under sell orders.

There was one sell offer for Subsystems that looked like it might be ok but I'm no expert on Subsystems prices.

The only other list with any traffic at all is the buy list for a single buyer. Nobody else can post to the list, it's read only for everyone except the lone buyer. That list had exactly 1 post to the list offering to buy a small handful of faction mods. Half his buy prices were decent (comparable to my own prices), the other half were rather low.

This reminds me of bulk buying in WoW. In WoW there's no equivalent to buy orders so your only options are to buy off the market auction, spam Trade Chat offering to buy things or watch Trade Chat for players wanting to sell things.

The big problem with purchasing under the WoW auction model is it heavily favors the no-lifers and bots who are always there. They're constantly (automatically) scanning the auction looking for just posted low priced auctions and snapping them up almost as quickly as they're posted. They're also constantly snapping up any cheap deals (often from hacked account fire sales) in Trade Chat. And they're usually spamming Trade Chat with lowball buy offers.

My server had one particularly obsessive no-lifer and bot (we called him Argabot, a play on his main character's name, replacing the last 3 letters with "bot"). This guy had at least 3 accounts and probably more with multiple max level crafters and a few "disposable" posting alts on each account.

Argabot was a real douchebag, he used multiple market bots to constantly undercut serious competitors and drive them out of business. Not only did he bot 24/7 but he sat there monitoring and watching his bots for 16+ hours a day too.

He was the absolute worst for spamming Trade with lowball buy offers too. If anyone else tried to buy something he considered "his" market he'd immediately (within a second or two) scroll your WTB offer offscreen with a 3 part WTS spam post offering overpriced crafted epic gear for sale. Then a few seconds later (with metronome like precision) he'd follow up with a WTB offer for the same item(s) you were buying at much lower prices. He'd do that 24 hours a day, 7 days a week basically forever until the competition threw in the towel and gave up.

It never failed to work for him, his army of auction bots drove many, many competitors out of business in multiple trades. Anyone who started looking like he might be serious competition was a target for his bots.

Then he targetted me...

Big mistake! I eventually figured out a way to combat his bots' buying power though it depended on having deep pockets. Very deep pockets.

I started advertising my better buy prices in Trade Chat with an offer to accept all CoDs at those prices too. CoD = Cash on Delivery, a type of mail used much like private item exchange contracts in Eve. I guaranteed I'd buy it all, I accepted all CoDs matching my prices no matter how much you were selling. I also promised most CoDs would be accepted within 24 hours and usually managed to accept within a few hours (the big exception being when a few thousand CoDs came in all at once, then it might take a day or two to accept them all).

It took a while. For a few months I wondered if I wasn't just wasting my time trying to buy in bulk through CoDs. I was getting some business but it was mostly little guys who thought 10 stacks of ore, herbs or gems was a lot and 100 stacks was huge, massive bulk. And I was looking for thousands and thousands of stacks worth millions of gold.

Then suddenly it took off. Several of the larger miners, herbalists and "elementium shuffle" jewelcrafters realized I was an honest buyer, my prices were quite a bit better than Argabot's, I really would buy it all and not only did I not rip people off but when they made a mistake and accidentally underpriced some CoDs I'd catch the error and make up the difference anyhow.

The word spread fast from there. Pretty soon most big farmers were refusing to sell to Argabot at all anymore. They'd only sell to me and a couple other guys they knew weren't Argabot alts. My prices weren't just better than his, they were fair and I didn't try to grind them down even lower every time the auction price dropped another cent either.

A couple of those suppliers had to be running bot farms, they each sold me thousands of stacks of ore and herbs at least twice a week.

About 3 months later Argabot and most of his crafting alts transferred off the server. With his supply of cheap crafting materials cut off he wasn't making nearly as much from his RMT gold selling business as he used to anymore so he moved.

I won an all out trade war with the worst, most obsessive, manipulative, no-life, botting, real money trading scumbag I ever ran into playing WoW!

Anyhow the point of the WoW story is it took time (several months) to build up my CoD bulk buying business in WoW and I figure the same will be true of bulk contract buying in Eve. I'm in it for the long term and won't be giving up due to poor initial results.

Looking for Bulk Contracts

There's a new Bulk Prices page here at Merchant Monarchy.

I've begun experimenting with Bulk Buying through contracts. The new page lists my prices for various different faction mods, implants and ships I buy in bulk. I'll accept contracts in any of 21 different locations throughout contiguous hi sec.

I've also posted a small subset of the items listed there to the "Wholesale Trading" mailing list.

Take a look at the new page and feel free to leave feedback on pricing, minimum numbers, items you'd like to see added to the list and so on.

When it comes to items I'm generally not interested in anything worth much less than 10 million each. +3 implants are an exception because they're high volume and even large stacks (100+) of them don't take up very much space.

Bulk Trade Mailing Lists

I keep hearing about various different "bulk trade" channels and mailing lists. I never really bothered checking into them before because I'm not interested in buying huge piles of materials or really big stacks of cheap stuff. I deal almost exclusively in expensive items like faction mods and implants.

Recently however I ran across some comments about a rich player X ATM#### who's supposedly the biggest buyer and seller of bulk faction mods (or claims to be anyhow). That definitely got my attention since I'm pretty big in faction mods myself. It's always nice to know who the competition is and what they're up to.

So I did some quick Google research and discovered he does most of his purchasing by soliciting private contracts through an in-game mailing list.

I was a little surprised to find they consider a stack of 5 to be a "bulk" sale, especially for the cheaper items. I was expecting bigger numbers than that. I don't consider myself a really big player in the faction mods market but I can (and do) easily handle much larger purchases than that.

And the best bulk prices? I dunno about that. While their prices are similar to mine on 2 of the above items I pay significantly better for the other 4 items. I buy a lot more than just 6 items and I buy just about everywhere in 21 different regions, not just on Jita.

I also found some talk from X about routinely doing 10 billion a day in business. I can easily handle that kind of volume too. In fact I do that kind of business already, only with a lot of shipping required to get things from where they were purchased to where I want to sell it.

I also found a few other bulk trade lists that allow anyone to post WTB / WTS requests. The biggest was named "Bulk Trade" but for some reason it tells me "You're not allowed to join this list". I'm not sure why, maybe it's full (I hear in-game mailing lists are limited to 3000 members) or maybe the list owner has banned starter corps (all my alts are in starter corps). The other bulk lists I found all seemed dead or nearly so.

If people actually sell significant numbers of faction mods to X ATM and his partner(s) at those prices maybe I should start a bulk trade mailing list too. Only I'd accept contracts on 22 different hubs throughout contiguous hi sec (one hub in each region) and allow other traders as well as industrialists, FW LP farmers or whatever to participate with WTB / WTS offers too.

Somergate 2014

Somerblink and their disreputable RMT "money laundering" partner Marquee Dragon are at it again.

Predictably the community is once again in an uproar. There's plenty of coverage elsewhere on exactly what they're doing this time and everyone's probably heard it by now so I won't bother going into that.

Instead I'll go into some conjecture on what could happen if CCP decides this scheme is ok.

Let's all get rich!

Will anyone else who wants to do the same thing be allowed to?

I currently have am worth over 700 billion ISK and make about 50 billion per month. If I were to more than double Somer's "incentive" paying 100 million over the usual price for PLEX provided the PLEX were purchased from my affiliate link, I'd be paying out 1 billion for every 10 PLEX. And making 8 or 9 dollars per billion.

At 8 dollars per billion with 700 billion that comes out to about 5600 dollars. Not a bad deal for any player with a fair amount of ISK looking to cash out.

Or I could just sell 50 billion ISK a month and sustain that indefinitely. 400 bucks a month, 4,800 per year, that's a pretty decent little real life income supplement. Heck if I could double that I could quit my job and live entirely on officially sanctioned RMT plus my pension.

I suppose I could live with that.

And I'm not even all that rich, there are many players as rich as I am and quite a few that make me look like a pauper. And then there are the big cartels, alliances and corporations.

Let's get even richer!

Or here's some food for thought. What if an ETC reseller sets up a program selling PLEX for 30 dollars each with the referrer buying back the PLEX for ISK at double the usual rate and gives the entire extra 10 dollars to the referrer?

That'd be a pretty good "incentive" to buy from that particular setup. The referrer would be making about 12 dollars per billion (considering he gets half the ISK paid out back by reselling the PLEX) and while the ETC seller wouldn't be making any more per PLEX sold he'd almost certainly be doing more volume.

It's a slippery slope, where does it stop?

The final nail in Somer's coffin

Finally there's one point nobody seems to have considered yet. What if the ETC seller buys the PLEX back from the ISK buyer for real money?

Then it becomes a vicious circle with the same PLEX being sold repeatedly by the ETC seller and cutting CCP out of the loop.

I don't think there can be much doubt about what CCP will do once they finally figure that out. And this time around while they're dealing with Somer I hope they don't forget to shut down Marqee too.

Market Price History Accuracy

Market Price History is not an accurate indication of what things actually sell for.

For example here's a screenshot of the market history for PLEX in Domain.

Note the low prices on the dates 08-13 and 08-10 are 760 mil and 763 mil respectively. Yet when I look at my transaction log I can see I bought 5 on each those same dates for only 745 mil and 745.5 mil each.

Obviously price history is not a very accurate indication of what things actually sell for. So what is it then?

Market history does not show the prices things actually sell for. It seems to miss a lot of lower priced transactions (like my 10 PLEX above) which inflates the numbers meaning the prices things actually move at are often lower than market history indicates.

Maybe market history only uses sell orders without taking buy orders into account at all. That would certainly explain why my purchases (usually made with buy orders) are often lower than what market history says is the lowest price.

But that doesn't explain other inconsistencies in the history data, like how I sold 5 PLEX for 784 mil each on 08-13 when market history says the high price for that day was slightly less than that.

I know for a fact that on the 13th there were a whole lot of sell orders listed higher than 784 mil, many of them much higher so history can't be just taking periodic snapshots of listed sell orders as I first thought. That'd push the average way up.

Then again the average prices shown in my screenshots above are lower than I would have expected unless it IS taking buy orders into account too. But in that case why didn't my buy order purchases show up in the data?

Whatever the cause may be something funny is going on with market history. The problem is market history prices are often misleading, sometimes very misleading, especially for low volume items. In a worst case scenario, market history doesn't reflect anything near the real prices an item normally moves at but instead shows extremely overpriced listings that for the most part are NOT SELLING.

What I'd find a whole lot more useful than this is information on the prices things actually sell for. I'd much rather have accurate info on the prices (with volume numbers) something actually sold for than what someone listed it for.

On a related but slightly different note, in the case of PLEX I'd really like to see information on two specific things

1. How many PLEX were bought from CCP with real money.
2. How many PLEX were actually used (taken out of circulation and used for subs, transfers, etc).

Even yearly data on PLEX purchases and usage would be extremely useful though monthly data would be much better. No need to get fancy with in game statistics, regular reports or anything, a simple one time dev blog post containing the information would be just fine.

PLEX Prices - August 2014

PLEX prices have been rising rather rapidly for most of this year but the last month or so seem to have hit a plateau and even dropped off a bit.

The above screenshot is the price of PLEX on Amarr. Prices on Jita are similar. I choose to use Amarr for this example because margins are a bit better and I have more PLEX for sale there right now.

Coincidentally the dropoff started right when I jumped back into the PLEX market with the intention of trying to influence PLEX prices. No I'm not claiming credit for prices going down. Even though I intended to see if I could push prices down, they'd already just started going down as I returned to the market.

Back in my May PLEX Price Crash post I predicted PLEX prices would level off and possibly crash sometime before they hit 1 billion per PLEX. While this doesn't exactly qualify as a crash yet, prices certainly have come down a bit.

Well I did have more PLEX for sale on Amarr. I'd posted 5 PLEX at 784 mil each then started writing this article. About 10 minutes later I went to take a screen shot of the PLEX for sale and found all 5 of them had already sold.

Oh well, I guess those particular PLEX won't be pushing the price down any further. Still that's 39 million margin with roughly 17 million in taxes and fees leaving about 22 million profit per PLEX or 110 millon in total. Not too shabby for a quick and easy profit.

And here's a screenshot proving they were all bought not only in Domain but right on Amarr.

Power Projection - The Elephant in the Living Room

I don't know why everyone keeps coming up with all these convoluted, unnecessarily complex ideas about how to "fix null" while completely ignoring the elephant in the living room.

Power Projection - A term used in military and political science to refer to the capacity of a power bloc to conduct war. IE, to intimidate other powers and implement policy by means of force, or the threat thereof, in an area distant from its own territory.

Power projection in Eve is insanely overpowered. It's completely ridiculous how massive fleets of the largest most powerful ships in the game can also travel across the entire map faster than anything else.

This leads to sov war being a game of RISK in Space with unlimited airdrop rules. All that really matters is who has the biggest teleporting blob because that blob can be anywhere you want it very quickly. More quickly than much smaller, far closer, but purely local forces can respond.

If you really want to fix null, the one thing that must be done is to nerf power projection so the big blobs can't just attack anyone, anywhere, anytime with total impunity and overwhelming numbers for easy, guaranteed wins anymore.

Jump drives on capital ships and Jump Bridges should be removed from the game.

That would make capitals the core of the home defense fleet rather than the fast reaction teleporting IWin blobs they are now. As it should be.

In reality the disadvantages of large, extremely powerful forces are that they're slow, difficult to move, maneuver, support and supply over long distances. They are by no means a quick reaction force. Jump mechanics turn reality upside down and give a massive, unsurmountable advantage to gigantic fleets of the largest ships in the game.

Leaving jump capability on Black Ops should be ok. As a plus they're actually extremely well suited to smaller fleets fighting geurrilla warfare *against* the big blocs and their giant blobs.

Edit: heh, fixed a silly typo, it's "big blobs" not "big blogs".

Training Report - August 2014

Training report for 08 August 2014

I haven't done a training report since March and I use these to help myself keep track of my plans too so it's time for another.

First the numbers:

12 Accounts
29 Characters (30 if you count a "Junk Storage" character with no training other than social I and contracting I)

26 Traders (24 active, 2 spares, all finished training trade skills)
21 (out of 23 total) Empire regions covered by traders

5 Covert Ops pilots
26 Blockade Runner pilots
2 Tengu pilots
1 Recon pilot
1 Rattlesnake pilot
2 Black Ops pilots (1 Panther, 1 Widow)
29 Vigil pilots =)

12+ PLEX per month (12 subscriptions plus more for dual training)

I work a mix of regional and station trading with a fair bit of hauling and courier contracts between regions. I'm always moving up market (dropping cheaper items and replacing them with more expensive items).

I train my traders for 305 orders with the following trade skills: Trade V, Retail V, Wholesale V, Tycoon V, Accounting V, Broker Relations V, Margin Trading V, Daytrading V, Marketing V, Procurement IV, Visibility IV and Contracting IV (6,716,785 SP). I consider them to be "finished" training trade skills at that point.

All but one of my traders are also Blockade Runner (Prowler) pilots. I train them for Transport Ships IV, with all important subcap Shield, Fitting and Navigation skills at IV or V (mostly Vs with a few IVs).

Account 1

3 fully trained traders, all flying Blockade Runners, covering Essence, Tash-Murkon and Verge Vendor Regions. Currently working on finishing training Navigation, Fitting and Shields on all of them.

Future plans: Train Cyno V on all 3 characters and train at least 1 character into Bombers (Covert Ops + Missile skills).

Account 2

The traders of Amarr, Dodixie and Rens. All 3 are finished training trade skills. Also finished training Capacitor, Navigation, Engineering and Shield skills on all 3 characters to mostly Vs and a few IVs. Two are Covert Ops pilots, all three are Blockade Runner Pilots. Currently training Cyno V on Rens.

Future plans: Will probably train missile skills on Rens next so he can fly Bombers. After I'll probably either get Cyno V on the other two or start training one of them into Industry.

Account 3

Lonetrek Trader - Finished training trade skills. Covert Ops and Blockade Runner pilot with Cyno V. Currently training Covert Ops V and Missile skills to fly Bombers.

Jita Trader #2 -  Finished training trade skills. Does nothing but trade officer/deadspace/faction mods. Blockade Runner pilot.

The Bleak Lands Trader - Finished training Trade skills. Blockade Runner pilot.

Future plans: Continue training Bomber skills on Lonetrek, then get Jita's Navigation, Fitting and Shield skills up higher..

Account 4

Jita Trader #1 - Finished training trade skills. Blockade Runner pilot. Does nothing but trade skill-books. This is the only character that still deals in very many items worth less than 20 million ISK.

Exploration / Scout / Scanning pilot - A combat pilot, not a trader.. Flies Covert Ops (Buzzard), Recon (Falcon), Tengu and Black Ops (Widow). Has Astrometrics V, all the rest of the astrometrics skills at IV and most shield, navigation, fitting, EW and exploration skills at IV or V. Currently in a Per/Wil remap training Missile skills and Black Ops V.

Future plans: Finish training Black Ops, Missile and Jump skills to V. Eventually start a new character on this account.

Account 5

My Main - Covert Ops, Tengu, Rattlesnake, Panther pilot with all racial Battlecruiser and Destroyer skills at V. Has half decent trade skills but hasn't done any trading in a long time now. Currently in an Int/Mem remap working on Jump skills and other Int/Mem support skills.

Stacmon Trader - Finished training Trade skills. Blockade Runner pilot.

Future plans: My main is finally finished training subcap Missile skills now. He can use all T2 subcap launchers with IVs in missile specialization skills and Vs in all missile support skills. Eventually he'll probably train Recons, HACs, Interdictors and HICs too. I'll probably start a 3rd character on this account eventually.

Account 6

Dual training active

Hek Trader - Finished training Trade skills. Covert Ops and Blockade Runner pilot. Currently training Acceleration Control V. Will remap Per/Wil to start training Missile skills soon.

Jita trader #4 - Finished training Trade skills.  Blockade Runner Pilot. Handles the Jita implants market and dabbles a little in other markets. Currently training Int/Mem support skills higher.

Devoid Trader - Finished training trade skills. Blockade Runner pilot.

Future plans: Finish training int/mem support skills on Jita. Train Missile skills on Hek soon so he can fly Bombers.

Accounts 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Six accounts I started just before the news about dual training broke. They're all trader / blockade runner pilots following the same training plan.

All six original characters are finished training trade skills, fly Blockade Runners and are either finished or nearly finished training flying support skills (mainly Navigation, Engineering and Shield skills).

All 6 accounts also have 2nd characters that are finished training trade skills and in various stages of training blockade runners and int/mem support skills. All but one are following the same skill plan of training Trade skills (along with a few days worth of basic flying skills) first, then Blockade Runners and finally topping up Int/Mem support skills.

One character is following essentially the same training plan except he's training Blockade Runners and Int/Mem support skills *before Trade skills for a change.

10 of the 12 characters on these accounts are active traders, the other 2 are basically spare traders that aren't actually doing any trading right now.

Buyouts and Large Profit Margins

Sometimes the market for an item is low enough you can buy it all out, post a few for a large markup and make unusually large profit margins.

It's all about supply and demand, if there's steady demand for something with both supply and price low, it might be a good time for a buyout.

This tends to work best on relatively cheap stuff, someone might pay 25 or even 50 million for an item that usually goes for 1 million (especially if he's just gotta have it RIGHT NOW) but it's highly unlikely anyone will pay 1 bil for something that usually goes 100 mil.

For example:

MHVO-Is usually go for around 1 million ISK each. I bought out 100 or so of them for a bit less than that. Then I posted 10 for 25 mil each. I didn't get undercut for about a day and 5 of them sold before I did get undercut.

I already made back the 100 million I paid for all of them plus 25 million  in profit and I still have 95 of them left (5 more of which are up for around 10 million each now).

Not bad profit for buying a stack of things I keep in stock for my own use anyhow at a price slightly lower than usual. It's not the first time I've done that on MHVO-Is either. Last time I reposted them for 50 mil each and only sold 2 before getting undercut.

Trusted Contractors

I wish there was a "trusted contractor" list.

When accepting private contracts from anyone on the "trusted" list it'd skip the "Do really want to do this?" step and just accept it with one click. Even better if there was an option to make it so contracts are automatically accepted upon receipt without any clicking required at all.

Automatic could be a simple option affecting every name on the "trusted" list but it'd be more useful if it could be set individually for each name.

Ganked!

I finally lost my first Blockade Runner in high sec while on autopilot.

It was empty! =)

The funny thing is it wasn't in one of the usual places gankers like to camp like Uedama, Litiura, or the Aufay, Balle, Deltole chain. In fact it wasn't even in an 0.5 system, it was higher sec status than that. I'm surprised he managed to live for the 18 seconds it took him to blow up my ship before Concord arrived and killed him.

It might have been someone intentionally targeting me, hoping to win the BR lottery and cash in a big load. The character's name makes it pretty obvious to anyone who knows much about me that it must be one of my alts.

If that's the case I'll have to stop transporting big loads on that particular character. But that's ok, it happened to a character based out of Jita and I have plenty of other alts with less obvious names there.

The Milk Run

I do "Milk Runs" frequently, where I gather up everything not worth posting where it was bought and transport to a neighboring region (always in a Blockade Runner and usually on autopilot). I post whatever's worth posting there, gather up stuff in that region, make up another load and send it off to the next region.

Rinse and repeat until I've had enough for the day. The next day (or maybe a few days later) I'll continue on from wherever I left off until I've hit all my traders or there's not enough unposted stock left to make another trip worthwhile. When enough stock piles up to make another milk run worthwhile I start the process all over again.

Important note: All my traders fly Blockade Runners, doing similar milk runs in anything else wouldn't be nearly as safe. Especially not on autopilot as I usually am.

Here's an example of one day on the milk run.

The first thing I did was sort my Assets in jEveAssets with the most assets at the top to see where I had the most stock lying around unposted.

The first 2 traders had over 12 billion in assets each. Since those are the traders of Hek and Rens, it made sense to start the milk run off in Minmatar space. So I posted some stuff on Hek, then contracted 8.6 billion worth of stock from Hek to the trader on Teonusude in Molden Heath.

The Teonusude Trader posted a few things (not much, only 2 or 3 billion worth), added some implants to the load and contracted a bit over 7 billion worth off to Rens.

The Rens trader picked it up, flew it back to Rens, posted a bunch of stuff and added a bunch more to the load. He contracted over 15 billion off to the Berta trader in Derelik.

The Berta trader picked it up, flew back to Berta, posted some of it there, added a few things to load and contracted 13 billion worth of stuff off to the next trader in line.

In all it took about 4 hours real time (mostly AFK) and maybe 15 minutes where I was actually at the keyboard. I spent more keyboard time on this post than on the actual trip.

Just in case some ganker reads this and gets the bright idea it might be worth his time to kill all BRs leaving Berta for a day or two... The milk run was long gone from Berta before I posted this.

Financial Report - July 2014

Financial report for the month of July 2014 (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 an army of 24 traders covering 19 regions in most of empire space (everywhere except Aridia and Solitude). All of those traders are also Blockade Runner pilots, capable of doing their own transport (mostly on autopilot).

July was another slow month for me, I did even less than in June but still made a profit of over 47 billion after expenses. And that's in spite of buying and burning 25 PLEX (more than twice as many as I need to use every month). If I hadn't bought (and used) so many PLEX this probably would have been a record breaking month for me of near 60 billion.

Current net worth is 688 billion with roughly half in cash and market escrow. Most of the rest is in sell orders and recently acquired assets I haven't gotten around to posting for sale yet. Very little is in assets I don't intend to sell soon, with maybe 5 billion worth of ships and fittings I keep for my own use.

After a fairly lengthy hiatus I moved back into the PLEX market near the end of the month. PLEX prices were just getting too high so I'm doing my part to stabilize prices and maybe bring them back down a bit.

The high volume items I mentioned last month are still performing very well though prices are close to all time (since I've been playing anyhow) lows. In fact I attribute a 10+ billion / month increase in profits over the last several months to those items.