Saturday, October 18, 2014

Spreadsheet Warrior? Or 'eyeball' it?

I'm also interested if there are any who completely spreadsheet warrior it or just eyeball it?

Passively Trading

It's been forever it feels like since I've really had time to log and do more than seriously basic items.

I've mainly kept my main in training and let all my industry alts lapse after Crius. It didn't help CCP couldn't figure out mineral requirements on blueprints in the patches leading up to Oceanus.

Phoebe will make things interesting. I've got no time to deeply research the in's and out's, so I've returned to trading. I've been banking capital for months and kept a single Jita alt buying and selling. In theory, I could re-activate a few Indy alts and find an NPC station with a low index and go nuts. But that's more effort than I feel like expending currently.

I will be training alts that exist solely to trade in each hub and between each region. Yes, it's some form of effort but very low effort. I can spend 10-20 idle minutes a day over the accounts bumping orders and processing shipments to other traders. 

Why not choose something that is better return? Moon mining? Incursions? Capital construction?

I could do any or all of those things. Catch is not a stable environment currently for those items. Moon mining is an alliance level activity and my little industry corp within Brave cannot defend any assets with any ferocity. Incursions are lucrative for sure, but again, this requires me to F1 things and unless in well protected space is disastrous in null. The only one I can speak to is capital construction. I will require more isk to invest in blueprints, minerals and shipping. More effort than I'm going for in this likely permanent experiment.

Another update soon. Or in a few months, these are effort after all...

Friday, June 13, 2014

PI project results

Before things got really crazy, I had started a small, low effort PI colony. I trained a char to IV's in the PI skills and went to a quiet .1 system and plopped down some command centers.

That was the easy part...I didn't watch any videos beforehand or read up on it terribly well. It was evidenced by the many mistakes in the process. I opted for 3 basic factories, 6 advanced and 7 extractors.

Between forgetting to route mats to factories and basics to advanced and then to the damn pad, I still worked the kinks out. It took longer to make isk but the isk is there.

This also took place between Sendaya and Burn Catch ops. Consequently, my PI products purchased via the buyback dropped. This was related to our pulling up roots out of Barleguet and PI in and around 'home' being part of those roots.

PI is still a way to passively or 'aggressively' make money in Eve. Whether you are hyper-efficient or bumble through it all as I did. It always impresses me the amount of things possible in Eve for isk generation. 

Trading Again?

I've had to lay low for quite a while due to work and personal projects. At work we retired and decommished 200+ WinXP machines. 'We' as in the organization as a whole, I'm the only 'admin' at the site.

To add to the madness, at home an extensive renovation project also had to take place. So, between painting, replacing light fixtures, ripping up linoleum and moving, I've been unable to devote time to my Eve Bucket List.

Now, that's all (mostly)settled down, I've taken to running the Alliance buyback in a less...idiotic fashion. Nullsec brings its own challenges with exporting. I have to use alliance JF services and love it. 9 of 10 contracts get moved from roughly 7 different 'hub' stations within 24 hours. I have tried to sit down 2 times per week and ship half of everything out and leave the other for later times.

My business has tripled with the move to null, along with volume. I attribute this to an increase in exploration, hacking and ratting. Salvage is always easily had as there are always fights right outside the station.

I took my trader, yet again, out of retirement. This is a char I trained all the market skills to V because:reasons. I am trying new and different markets out. Mainly to prove to myself I still had the ability.

I dropped 2B in the wallet and flew off to Jita. I aimed for stuff of all sorts with the high volume, low profit approach to wealth growth in mind. I spent myself to about 600M left on my wallet and logged for the night.

I awoke to most orders being .01'd about 25 orders or so. A couple had their sell orders set to .01 over buy. While some stuff had made its way into my hangar. I immediately flipped those and monitored for slow moving, low profit things.

I was impressed that after lather, rinse, repeat on low isk return items I managed to break 300M profit in about 4 days. I did babysit for a while and other times didn't touch it for long periods. 

This approach overall works, though remarkably inefficiently. I suspect changing items, stations and another trader would bring better isk/hr return but that's a project for another time.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

PI: Wat

I have admittedly, never setup a PI planet of my own. I've bought billions of PI stuff by now and fielded questions about it like mad. Those questions end in 'I dunno, I just buy the stuff.'

I'm still terrible at Eve but PI is ok passive cash but stupidly click intensive. Some have multiple alts doing this and claiming at least a billion+ in income. 

Setting up in hi-sec and expecting decent return was idiocy. I set up three planets and called it over and done within a couple of hours. I found a null system that had 5 planets I could expect decent return from and will keep monitoring. I may even jump into a hole after training some scanning skills.

It looks like I chose a less than great 'hotspot' for a couple planets, as I'm pulling in 14k per cycle of one mat, routing it to storage at each end and routing to basic factories and an advanced at the end. The other mat indicates 12k at the ECU but pulls ~7K in reality, resulting in lowered productivity as there aren't enough to keep pace.

I'm almost keen on trading again soon in the future. I've started to make more headway at work and instead of afk-ing and passively paying attention to contracts, I can devote more time to trading and production endeavors.

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Sold out

Rather unexpectedly, I am completely sold out of the second batch of items I put on market in Sendaya. The pre-deployment items I seeded, sold out within ~36 hours.

There have been ridiculous claims from both ends of the spectrum, prices are too low, prices aren't high enough. Realistically, we didn't do a fantastic job seeding the market beforehand. We have a lot of work ahead but there is a lot we've identified as problems for correcting.

The biggest complaint I've heard this deployment: prices are hurting the 'poorer' (newest) newbies. This is accurate. I sold batches of newbie frigates for Jita +10%, they sold near immediately. They were also relisted at Jita + 30% near immediately. So, we see ships selling at 500k+ or 1.2m for basics. Shuttles at one point sold in the 200m price point.

It's really isk inefficient for our jump freighter pilots to move in large numbers of frigates, they're risking their own 6-7 Billion isk ship and jump fuel at no official reimbursement should they get bumped or trapped on the awful Sendaya station.

All in all, I'll freight in a few more loads of stuff and play the contract market I believe. They're almost always a turn-key product.

Otherwise, I'm less interested in the .1 isk game, for giggles I kept reducing in percentages. Then adding buy orders to further squeeze the fun out for the .1er's.


Sunday, March 2, 2014

Long Term Deployment

Now that the cat is semi out of the bag, The Corp and all alliances are deploying long term. This would be the first major deployment I've been part of. I'm honestly excited. I've been prepped and hauling items to a staging system for several days.

I have added myself to a list of members designated to bring in items and create a Day One market. Leadership has listened to the 'line member' complaints about the way markets have been handled in other past ops. War will prove good for business.

I do plan to honestly trade in this market we wish to create. I have held off on trading at large levels for some time now. I have 2 chars that have tycoon to IV and most fee reduction skills to V. Now is the time to utilize all my isk. Finally!

War is nigh!