PLEX Report October 2015

Well after another month long hiatus, I've been back again for a little more than a week. I logged in 4 or 5 times, spending half an hour to an hour each time updating and placing PLEX orders.

The no-lifers and bots seem to be pushing really hard to raise PLEX prices again, which is great for my business. Rising prices means I can easily make big profits with almost no effort. :)

Like this:

Note those transactions are over a ~3 day period where I *didn't* log in at all.

Easy money...

I also posted some more sell orders on old stock (stuff bought months ago when I was working hundreds of different items) in a couple places. Even though it's months later and it takes time to sell it off, the profits I'm making on most of that old stock are quite high. In some cases amazingly high (well over 100% profit).

Here's a small sample of that business:

The PLEX Experiment - Ramping Up Volume

This is an update on how The PLEX Experiment - Buying and Selling PLEX for Profit is coming along.

I've been slowly increasing my presence in the PLEX market, testing theories and trying different things to see how the market and the competition reacts.

This weekend I got extremely aggressive in the PLEX market, increasing both the prices I was paying and how many I was buying in each of 22 different regions. I wanted to buy and sell a lot more PLEX than I usually do and see what kind of effect greatly increasing my sales volume would have on profits.

It worked very well on the buying side. On Friday I bought 63 PLEX, on Saturday I bought another 108 for a total of 171 in 48 hours. It looks like I probably can buy 100 a day, at least on the weekends.

Unfortunately sales weren't nearly as good, I only sold 17 on Friday and 18 on Saturday for 35 in total. Once I started selling more than 1 or 2 PLEX at a time anywhere the no-lifers and bots quickly came out of the woodwork and began undercutting me constantly.

It didn't take long before sell prices were down into the low 800 millions in most places and even under 800 million in some places (Jita for one).

Of course if I can't resell PLEX at a profit quickly enough, I won't be able to buy 100 a day for very long before I'm out of cash and sitting on stacks of PLEX. Many competitors will happily sell PLEX for 12 million markup and some even less. It looks like the key to doing any real volume (selling more than a few PLEX a day in any one region) is going to be grinding faction and corporation standing even more to lower broker fees even further.

Unless of course those competitors are bluffing and can't keep up the undercutting game for much longer. In that case I should be able to sell all or most of my PLEX during the next week and buy more the following weekend.

Strangely enough, one place were my PLEX sales did do very well this weekend (much better than usual) was Genesis. For some reason the Malma bot backed off on PLEX this weekend, but not on other things.

I've noticed several patterns in PLEX sales, some seem to be natural and others manipulative. The main thing is there's a weekly cycle (often hidden by manipulation) where prices go down on the weekend and back up during the week.

Though I can't prove it, I'm quite sure this is due to more PLEX being purchased for real money on the weekends and sold quickly for ISK which tends to bring prices down. Then during the week, fewer new PLEX enter the market, prices tend to go back up and many of the PLEX purchased on the weekend are resold for profit.

It's also interesting how shortly after I ramped up my business and grabbed more market share prices dropped significantly. That's not the first time that's happened either. It happens every time I try to sell more than 1 or 2 PLEX in the same region, prices go down and undercuts become far more frequent. To me that's a strong indication bots are very active in the PLEX market.

Then again, considering how much prices have dropped over the last 2 days and how the blocking orders have disappeared again, it's possible the market might be starting to crash. In that case I picked a very bad time to increase my volume and could wind up losing some billions or even 10s of billions.

PLEX Price Trends

It's too early to say for sure but it looks like the recent PLEX price trend may be changing. The price rose somewhat quite recently and has been holding fairly steady since at around 820 million each.

Of particular interest is that for the first time in over a month the 5 day average is above the 20 day average. This is an indication prices are rising (or have risen recently).

Normally I'd consider that a strong indicator the trend is about to reverse and prices start going up again but right now things are still very much up in the air regarding the multi-boxing policy changes.

The next week or so should give us a better idea if the downward trend is going to continue (possibly at a lower rate), if prices will drop even further, begin to stabilize, or start rising again.

Really what happens next is heavily dependent on how well (or conversely how poorly) and how strictly CCP enforces the new policy. And it's probably going to be a while longer before we know for sure about that.

If you think CCP will not be effective at enforcing the new policy, then it's time to start buying now. If you think they'll be banning cheaters left and right, then it might be a good idea to sell before the price starts going back down again.

The PLEX Experiment - Buying and Selling PLEX for Profit

Following up on my last post where I mentioned wanting to be a bigger player in the PLEX market I'm slowly increasing my PLEX market presence in 22 Empire regions. The following is a report analyzing all of my PLEX transactions on the 8th of Jan 2015.

I bought 27 PLEX for a rough average of about 770 million each and sold 19 for an average of more than 815 million each. 815 - 770 = 45 million spread. Assuming my costs to buy and sell 1 PLEX are 15 million each that would represent a profit of 30 million each.  Actually my average cost is less than 15 mil (a bit more on some characters, much less on others), but 15 mil is a nice round number to work with.

So far today (09 Jan 2015 which isn't over yet) I've bought another 34 for around 775 mil each and sold 26 for close to 820 mil each. 820 - 770 = 45 mil, about the same average margin (45 mil) and same profit of 30 mil per PLEX.

That's roughly 3.75% profit (using round numbers 30 / 800 = 0.0375). 3.75% doesn't sound like much but it adds up with volume. Buying and selling 25 PLEX per day at 30 mil profit each equals 750 million a day, or 22.5 billion a month. Not too shabby when you look at it like that.

Double the volume (50 per day) and it comes out to 45 billion a month.

Of course 30 mil profit per PLEX is probably too much to expect over the long term, especially when dealing in greater volumes. Even 20 million profit might be too much but I shouldn't have any trouble averaging 10 or 15 million profit per PLEX in such low volumes.

The big questions are

1. How tight will margins and spreads get as volume increases?
2. Will it be possible to increase volume to 50, 100 or more without becoming a no-lifer and if so just how much time and effort will it take?

Assuming I can reliably (and without too much effort) move 50 per day at a profit of 10 mil each that'd be 500 million a day and 15 billion a month. Move 100 a day and the numbers double, 1 bil per day, 30 bil per month.

Over the next weeks and months, I intend to continue slowly increasing my presence in the PLEX market until I find the sweet spot between volume and profit margins where I make the most ISK without too much effort.

Several of my characters have 0 standings and better standings are definitely necessary to stay in the game when spreads drop under 18 million. I'll have to grind standings on all of those characters and doing it the quick way is going to cost 3+ billion per character.

If the experiment works out really well, I'll probably wind up dropping out of most of my current markets and whittling my list of items down to just the best of my current items (no more than 50, probably more like 25-30 or even less).

800 Billion

I haven't posted a financial report in a couple months because I haven't really been doing much lately. It took nearly two months to make what I usually make in one but I finally broke 800 billion over the weekend... Blew it away in fact!

Normally I spend an hour or two a day (on average) working the market for 30-40 total hours a month. When I do that fairly consistently (without skipping too many days) I make around 50 billion per month after expenses (with expenses of 10-12 billion per month).

Lately however, expenses have been up a fair bit due to grinding standings for lower broker fees. I've been spending billions buying pirate tags for Data Center mission turn-ins for faction standings and paying TSCA to grind specific corporation standings for me. That costs 600 mil - 1 bil per character depending on tag prices for faction standing and 2.75 bil per character for 0-8 corp standing. Lower broker fees will pay off over the long term but for the short term it's a one time sunk cost reducing short term profits.

More recently PLEX prices have gone up significantly but the increased cost there has been more than offset by the fact that I'm using fewer PLEX (none at all right now) for dual training than I used to. I used to pretty much always have at least 2-4 accounts dual training and sometimes more.

Most importantly though, I've been far less active on the market, spending only 10 or 15 hours at it in Oct and another 10 or so in the first half of Nov. Last weekend though I was almost back to normal and it shows in my bottom line. Total net worth went up by more than 25 billion over the weekend.

Of course that doesn't mean I made 25 billion in profit in just a few days, a lot of that sudden increase was due to stock that had been purchased weeks ago but I didn't get around to transporting and posting for resale until last weekend.

I probably won't continue spending an hour or two a day working the market for much longer though. Unless and until that changes I won't be making 50 billion a month and I won't be posting regular monthly financial reports either.

PLEX Blunder

Someone made a big mistake today.

5.7 million to buy a PLEX. Not bad, I wish I could get them for that price!

It's too bad CCP won't fix the brain dead order filling code. Things like this should never happen, especially not on Jita.

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.

Financial Report - June 2014

Financial report for the month of June 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 traders covering all 5 main trade hubs (Jita, Amarr, Dodixie,  Hek and Rens) plus secondary hubs in most other empire regions. I have 24 active traders, 3 on Jita (one each for mods, implants and skillbooks), 2 in another region, another 19 each covering a different region and a couple spare traders that are not actively trading.

June was a slow month for me, I didn't do very much but I still made a profit of 43 billion after expenses.

Current net worth is 641 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.

The last several months I've significantly increased volume on ~20 high volume items and been playing longer term trends while spending less and less time at it every month. That's been working so well I'm considering concentrating on 20 to 40 items in even greater bulk, spending very little time at all on the rest and probably eventually dropping out of much of the rest completely.

The roughly 20 high volume items I'm working now are performing extremely well. There are at a least another 20 items that should perform similarly though with all the no-lifers and bots currently working those items it'll take a fair bit of work to inhibit their manipulations enough that prices begin to normalize and profit margins finally settle down to reasonable, reliable, steady levels.

Regional Transport Example

Double post today, here's a link to the first post How Rich is Rich

This is just a quick post to give an example of the cargo I typically carry around on runs between regions.

Basically I fly regional milk runs picking up everything worth picking up (generally any station with over 40 million worth of stock is worth it) and gather everything up on the station that serves as my base of operations in the region. Then I post anything worth posting locally and let the rest pile up until it either is worth posting or there's enough to make it worth sending off to another region.

Whenever I have a couple billion or more worth of overstock in one region I contract it to a character in a neighboring region. I log the neighbor in, fly out, pick it up and bring it back to his region. Then I do the milk run in that region, post whatever's worth posting there and contract whatever's left over to the next neighbor.

Rinse and repeat until I either don't have time to do anymore or there's not enough stuff left to bother moving on to the next region.

I don't do this on all characters every day, it usually takes a week or more to go through most of my characters, getting stuff moved around and posted. The bigger I get the more time it takes to get everything done so I'm constantly changing things to make the entire process more efficient and get more effective use of my time.

Oh... And of course I changed the name of the ship before taking the screenshot then changed it back again after.

Large Markups

I'm always saying how I normally don't price gouge and markup items too high. For the most part, I usually sell things at under 20% profit margin and often much less than that. However, sometimes I go for the big markup too, especially if there isn't much competition (or no competition at all).

For example:

According to the tooltip above, these normally go for a little more than 4 million ISK each and I got a 5 stack for 4 million each. Since I've never seen anyone selling them in the region I decided to put them up for 45 million each (more than 10x what I paid for them) and see what happened.

A bit less than a week later one sold, paying for the entire 5 stack more than twice over.

Someone else was buying them too at first, a cut war with him is why I paid so much for them in the first place. That competition is gone now though, for the time being I have the entire regional market on both buy and sell orders to myself with no competition.

Maybe I'll sell a few more before new competition sprouts up and maybe not. Regardless, I've already bought 15 for 60 million and recouped 45 million on a single sale, leaving only 15 million more needed to cover the cost of them all and I still have 14 left to sell. It's unlikely I'll manage to sell very many at that kind of profit but I can probably get more than 5 million each (maybe a lot more) and I'll still wind up with a pretty decent profit on the lot in the end.

Financial Report - May 2014

Financial report for the month of May 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 traders covering all 5 main trade hubs (Jita, Amarr, Dodixie,  Hek and Rens) plus secondary hubs in most other empire regions. I have 24 active traders, 3 on Jita (one each for mods, implants and skillbooks), 2 in another region, another 19 each covering a different region and a couple spare traders that are not actively trading.

In May, I made a profit of 54 billion after expenses (about 65 billion before expenses). That's a new monthly record for me!

Current net worth is 598 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 4 billion worth of ships and fittings I keep for my own use.

Faulty Logic

Another blunder. How NOT to get rich buying and selling on the market.

First he sold me 1 for 210 mil and bought it back a few days later for 290 mil. Then 5 days after that he sells me 2 more for 211 mil each and buys 1 an hour later for 280.7 mil.

Financial Report - April 2014

Financial report for the month of April 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 traders covering all 5 main trade hubs (Jita, Amarr, Dodixie,  Hek and Rens) plus secondary hubs in most other empire regions. I have 24 active traders, 3 on Jita (one each for mods, implants and skillbooks), 2 in another region, another 19 each covering a different region and a couple spare traders that are not actively trading.

In April, I made a profit of 38 billion after expenses.

Current net worth is 544 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 4 billion worth of ships and fittings I keep for my own use.

Business As Usual - Only Better

Burn Jita is on but if not for some slight difficulty logging into a character in Jita and the constant lag tidi I wouldn't have noticed. For me it's mostly business as usual, flying billions in and out of Jita on autopilot.

Here's an example of one load I autopiloted into Jita today.

The only difference between today and my usual business is things are selling faster and for higher prices than normal.

Conclusion: Burn Jita isn't achieving it's stated objectives. To the contrary it's great for business. I wish they'd do it all year long!

Carriers and Capitals

Just another quick example of 1 days worth of buying on one character from more or less passive buys orders (orders I update very infrequently and mostly just let sit there until they get filled) on one of the main trade hubs.

The carrier and capital ship book purchases are particularly nice with anywhere from 40 million to 125 million ISK profit per book if I were to resell them at school prices. Of course that's not including taxes and fees which come out to approximately 10 million per book but then again I'll be reselling each book for at least 10 million and maybe as much as 50 million over the school price.

I should wind up with at least 400 million profit on just the carrier and capital books.

Though the buy orders had 10 jump range all of the carrier and capital books were sold to me directly on the hub so I didn't even have to transport them to the hub. In fact they were all sold to me by the same player and completely filled my buy orders for all 3 books. Maybe I should start buying 5 or 10 at a time instead of 2 or 4.

Sweet Sisters Deal

Another blunder

I got a sweet deal on some Sisters launchers today due to another player's mistake. It was probably intended to be an extreme lowball buy order that got accidentally entered as a sell order instead.

Normally I don't post the name of the player making a mistake but since I recognized the name this time I couldn't resist.

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

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.

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.