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...

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.

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.

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.

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!

PI Mats, woo!

I started trading what seems like so long ago now. I have 2 traders currently, intra-regional trading. 1 covering Jita and Amarr, the other takes care of Dodi, Hek and Rens. I might get excited and pull a Moxnix and skill a load of new alts.

Earlier in my 'career,' I complained of buying and selling PI mats for profit. This was a very volatile market with potential to lose hundreds of thousands rather rapidly. I was also buying according to a different scale. I have safely made over 1.5 B isk from PI in the last month.

I also until recently neglected my order slots and only have roughly 70 in use at the moment. I've also started looking towards making some investments in the Alliance, unofficially reimbursing loses made traveling to Barleguet for brand new players, giving away ships I can't fly and bought 'on sale,' and buying skillbooks for some of the less patient.

I came to Eve and realized quickly I'm not well versed in PvP, politics, mining or even PvE. I love Eve for the "boring" things, trading and managing copy, invention and production lines. It's lots of fun to login and note my wealth has almost doubled while sleeping.

Looooong break

So sorry for the lack of content here. I had a computer malfunction, changed jobs, etc. I'm clearing a less than enjoyable family situation right now.

I've been hiding in station and basically logging in to copy/invent/produce. I've got some extremely basic markets I'm trading semi-actively in and really don't have much happening presently.

This will change shortly, however. I've got more capital and I'm bored laying in station.

Fly safe.

Gah, PI mats!

I bought a rather large contract of items in the past couple days. I was able to flip nearly everything for a profit within 14 hours with the exception of PI mats. Boo. I price things reasonably and HATE, HATE the .01 isk game.

In other news, I started using a script to grab from lots of stations I might branch out into when I decide to push an alt out there. I found it mentioned on Reddit and have adjusted it to fit my needs. It hadn't been touched in a few months and I like everything categorized so I'm not bashing eve-central with dozens of nonexistent item requests.

I also took my category list and pared it down further to things that tend to show any profitable margin. I'll still run my discovery script every couple weeks to see that items I buy are still profitable according to my automated method. This enables me to add in items and remove them at will.

Well. This is actually working.

Much to my surprise, I've crossed the 2 Billion isk mark. It's taken a bit if work to get here but nothing extraordinary. I'm happy with my present results and know I'm not using my isk to its potential. I'll work on that. So far so good.

Happy Halloween, I'm still alive!

I've barely been able to jump into Eve the past few days. Even so, I still made profit. Neat! 

Anyway, I hope to be past a busier than usual patch at work by the weekend and for all none you that read this, I'll be posting more regularly.

Inventory dump, capital injections and newbie realizations...

I decided that I needed more capital to trade in items with better margin and less competition. So, I sold nearly 2B in crap. Stockpiled minerals I'll never use for manufacturing, ships I haven't used (mining ships, mostly. Gah, so many wasted SP) in some time, rigs, excess...Just winter cleaning, you'd say.

Sure, I've made profit in some areas but it is taking more effort than time. I chose higher volume but lower margin items initially. It's neat seeing my wallet flash or checking my phone apps when I can't remote in from work. I'm liking seeing 9.5M profits per item instead of 115K, they still add up but theres a lot less work that way.

I need some alt accounts but that's going to have to wait for a bit. At present, I plan to keep my guy running from barle in placid to every which way in search of profits until I figure this thing out or biomass myself out of frustration.

Edit: Forgot the entire point of the post. Switching tactics made a huge difference: 31M today (and counting) versus 9M on average in the past several days.

Progress...and a small hiccup.

Well, I seem to have chosen well in some areas and not so wisely in another area. I initially set aside a little above 665M Isk for my foray into trading. I selected some basic items gathered from killboard views and my own fittings, picked my station and docked. Then I left for work. I went from 665M to 702M isk and was elated. This could work well!

This whole thing truly makes me afraid of making bad choices and losing it all in an instant. I'm nearly paralyzed to spend more than what I've allotted. I'll get better at this, I keep telling myself. I'm pretty terrible at the rest of Eve so this is kinda my last hope before biomassing myself, heh.

After discussing some initial fears with devoting my hard earned isk to this venture with a trusted friend, I expanded my horizons tonight after work and picked more items and planned a refill of what had sold throughout the night and today. Uedama. Lost about 92M in cargo. Oh well. Tomorrow is another day and a lesson learned. My wallet is blinking again, maybe I can pull this off after all.

Edit: 92 Million lost. I had 70 Million written before.

Celebratory inaugural postie

Greetings,

In the interest of brevity, This'll be moderately short. I'm fairly new to eve overall. I have spent a bit of time training market trade related skills as I've realized I'm Terri-bad at most other activities in Eve. 

So, here begins my journey in market supremacy, I hope to duplicate the success of other blogs' authors such as Moxnix of Merchant Monarchy, Sugar Kyle's Lowsec Lifestyle and Croda with Marketsforisk. I've tried to do some trading before and chose thin margined items or fat fingered number entry and killed my profits and then my motivation. I plan to initially use roughly 1 B isk to finance this operation. I've spent the last few days crafting my own spreadsheet with potential high-ish volume, decent margin items in a select batch of markets. We'll see.

Fly safe. (Or if you've come by from Brave Newbies,) Fly Brave.