The PLEX Experiment - Week Two

Last week I started ramping up the volume of my business in the PLEX market. Last weekend I bought over 200 PLEX on Friday and Saturday with another 50 plus on Sunday. I bought a lot more than I sold that weekend and I still had some from before too. The following Monday I still had over 200 left with about half in inventory and half posted in sell orders.

So the big question going into this week was if I could sell enough of them (at a profit of course) throughout the week without becoming a no-lifer and camping or if I was going to be stuck with a pile that would take a while to sell.

Though I wasn't able to sell even half of them during the week, I did sell the rest this weekend and prices went up a bit too so I made more than I would have if I'd just dumped them earlier. I picked up a bunch more at good prices to resell over the next week too so the experiment is going well so far.

Here's a quick example of my most recent PLEX transactions.

While these transactions were mostly on Monday with a few on Tuesday, transactions this weekend were similar with more sales than buys. Buy prices this weekend were a little higher than last weekend, but so were sell prices.

Also during the last week I managed to get broker fees on 4 more characters down to 0.50% or less. The majority of my traders are at 0.50% or less now and the rest should all be there in a couple weeks too. Then I can start working on getting them all down to 0.35% or less.

Right now about half my traders are at 0.50%, several are around 0.35% and some are even lower than that.  For the most part I need 12-14 million markup to make a profit and I'm doing quite a bit better than that... Better than expected, though I did have to be patient and sit on quite a bit of stock for a few days.

A character with perfect skills (Accounting and Broker Relations both at V) and neutral (0) standings pays 0.75% broker fee on every order posted (both buy and sell) and pays 0.75% tax on sales. With PLEX at 800 million each his total cost to buy and sell 1 PLEX is 800 x 2.25% = 18 million.

Perfect standings of 10/10 with corporation/faction brings broker fees down to just 0.1875% per order cutting the total cost in half. Cost is then (2 x 0.1875) + 0.75 = 1.125% or just 9 million.

0.50% fees put costs around 14 mil and 0.35% a bit under 12 mil.

I've come to realize I was thinking too small before. Way too small. I was just hoping I could buy around 50 PLEX a day or 1000 a month and make 10 million profit on each for a total monthly profit of 10 or 15 billion. That's just not very feasible, the no-lifers and bots won't let anyone sell that many PLEX at that big a profit unless they turn into a no-lifer or bot too. To sell that many without camping I'd have to cut margins and markups to the point where most of the no-lifers and bots can't compete anymore.

I should be setting my goals much higher. 1000 a day at 1 million profit each would be 1 billion a day or 30 billion a month. Of course to do that kind of volume I'd have to do a lot more high volume / low margin business on Jita and that means I'll probably need to get cost under 10 million per PLEX.

A few of my traders (including the Jita trader) are already well under 12 million cost. It'll take a while yet to get even just the Jita trader under 10 million but I will get at least Jita there eventually. In the meantime I'll just continue working on increasing my share of the PLEX market and putting as much pressure as possible on the no-lifers and bots.