Trade: Test run

Went ahead and did it. Ran the tool, went through its' recommendations, and picked a few that looked decent. Shipped ~5b of stuff from amarr to jita using a pushx rush contract.

The items were as follows: 70x silo, 10x prowler, 2x pithum a-type invulnerability field.

The a-type invulns sold exactly as expected, making me 156m.

Silos were selling for 18m in jita compared to 6 in amarr, presumably because of patch speculation. I sold 23 before prices crashed, sold many of them for a small profit, and also sold a dozen or so for sort of an intermediate number.

I sold 3 prowlers for a profit of 50m each, and then the price crashed to about buy price plus 10m. There are still 5 left on the market that I haven't spent enough time 0.01ing to sell, but I've decided to pretend I sold them at their present price and see how much I made.

The answer - after tax and so forth - seems to be that I made a profit of about 750m. This is not bad for the amount of work involved.

My takeaway is that in the case of the prowlers and silos, I bought too many -- silos were about 1/3 of jita's daily movement, while prowlers were about 1/2. In both cases they crashed to much lower profit margins before I could sell more than a fraction of my stock. In the future I should use more like 1/6th of the buying system's daily movement. The a-types which sold properly were 1/10th.

Also, when there's a profit to be made, expect to spend time 0.01ing, because everybody else is going to want in on the action too. Also, things that are dramatically out of line with historical values will probably tend to correct quickly. Unless there's an actual reason for it.

In terms of doing this more than once... yeah, probably. It would have to be my primary profession, if I was going to spend time 0.01ing. I might decide to take a month, do nothing but trade, and see how it goes.

Trade thing 5ish: Progress

I redid the equation I use to decide how many of an item are likely to be sold per day.

The first version was okay for high-volume items, but was bad at identifying items which sell less than one unit per day, which I don't really want to bother with. When I ran the trade finder many of the results were low-volume items that it thought I could trade and make a huge profit on, while actually doing so would have involved days of 0.01ing to sell a single unit.

The second version had the opposite problem -- it successfully ignored low-volume items, but thought it would be a super good idea for me to haul four trillion units of tritanium from jita to amarr.

So I put away the automatic curve fitter and did the variables by hand. Version three successfully ignored low-volume items, and thought jita moved about 15 billion units of tritanium per day. Huzzah.

Version four is version three with a flatter curve to make mid-high-range numbers more accurate. When I ran it for the first time the list of most profitable trades contained largely mid-range production stuff like ice products and PI or reaction materials, so I sighed and went to the game to get real numbers to compare with eve-central values... and it turned out the equations's numbers were correct. So I'm calling it good.

Also, I hadn't included taxes before, which resulted in the "profit" numbers it returned being inaccurate. If you move 4 billion isk worth of stuff for a before-tax profit of 150 million, the tax eats half of it. If you can move 1 billion for a profit of 149 million, that's a much better trade.

I guess this is the point where I do a trial run and see what happens.

Indy contributor: November

Another passive income month, refreshing orders every 90 days so they don't expire.

It looks like goons moved their staging point 1 jump away closer into my teritory (market hub proximity?). I dunno, it looks like there are more active players in the area where I am, including docked and undocked scouts. I'm probably not going to get my profit from these custom offices from PI this month, but it doesn't matter. 10k m^3 of p2 products is the limit of storage on my planets, so I'll first reach this number before I really get into it.

Blueprints haven't changed so far, but I am thinking about moving my off-character on my main account due to the price of PLEX.

Thinking about trade 4: It's happening?

So, I got the trade finder to run. Upon running it with only the first 150-ish items (out of about 3600), and only using amarr and jita as buy/sell systems, and only taking the top 10 results, it produced this:

As a sanity check I went to amarr and jita, found the real prices of the items and the quantities I would really buy, and got this:



As expected the quantities are pretty badly off, but the tool has successfully identified profitable trades and even put them in more or less the correct order. I'm calling this a win.

Thinking about trade 3: In which I build a list of items the easy way

Turns out my shell service wasn't banned from eve-central after all. The issue was a bug which made it look exactly as though it was -- complete with realistic timeouts on connection attempts.

Anyhoo, I'm trying to build a list of item types which are worth trading. My eventual plan, if I can get it to work, is to move items between trade hubs, which is a high-volume, low-margin proposition, so I've decided somewhat arbitrarily that I can ignore any item which Jita moves less than a billion isk worth of per day. We know The Equation can be off by at least a factor of 9, so I'm having it drop items it thinks move less than 100m per day.

Which turns out to be quite a lot of them. My list of items with market groups, minus blueprints, comes out at around 9700 items. Watching the process run, I'm expecting the number it thinks are worth trading to be less than half of that.

Thinking about trade 2: A list of typeIDs which can be found on the market

This is a list of all typeIDs which can be found on the market, taken from the latest static dump. It was very hard to get, so I may as well share.

In other news, I've gotten a free shell service banned from using the eve-central API. Which is exactly why I wasn't using my home IP.

Thinking about trade

I'm very lazy. I would never be able to compare hundreds of item types every day or maintain hundreds of buy and/or sell orders. But there's a lot of money in trade, so I keep thinking about it, trying to find an easy way to do it.

It would be easy to write a program that uses eve-central data to compare item prices in different market hubs. However, if you only look at prices, all the program's top results  would be very expensive items, like capital ships and deadspace modules. Eve-central doesn't track how many units are sold per day, so it's impossible to calculate profit potential.


And then I thought, "or is it"? Eve-central does track how many units of an item are on the market, and I'll bet there's a correlation between how many units are on the market and how many units are sold per day.

Of course, the market being what it is, there will never be a particularly strong correlation -- but it doesn't have to be strong. It just has to tell me that moving a bunch of nocxium at a profit of 10 isk per unit is more profitable than moving a single unit of whatever at a profit of one million per unit.

So I took a sample of item types and blah blah spreadsheets and quadratic regression blah and got this:

The sample size is way too small, but I can always go back and redo the equation with better numbers. The point is that it more or less works and I can tell how many units are being sold to within about an order of magnitude.

Next step? Sorcery.

Added a little something to the spreadsheet

Completely automated. I should have learned to import from eve-central a long time ago.

New spreadsheet: Done

It's a lot simpler than the last one, at least from a user's perspective. Behind the scenes it's all pulling prices from eve-central and being like =IF(OR(B$54=" ",B$55=" "),0,(ROUNDUP((1-B$55/100)*HLOOKUP(B$54,$B$31:$Z$51,2,0))))

With that done, now I have to wait for my refining skills for those ores to all be level 5 before I can build anything. That's 25 days out.

Apparently it's important to have ME10 on capital blueprints

Somebody poked me and got me to look at the numbers, and now I'm - maybe - getting back into capital manufacturing.

Thing is, though, I was working on the new spreadsheet and compared minerals required for three ME9 blueprints - archon, chimera, nidhoggur - to the minerals required for those same blueprints with optimal ME on my old spreadsheet. The difference was 10%.

That seemed horribly wrong. So I compared everything and found there were two reasons for it.

First, carriers post-crius use slightly more components.

Second, ME10 now makes a huge difference. Under the old system, the last material level would save you one or two components. Under Crius, every component the ship uses 8-10 of at perfect ME it uses one more of at ME9, which in an archon is half the components. In ships that use more components, like dreadnaughts, the ME10 effect is smaller but still significant, as you can see below.

Industry Contributor: October Report

 

  

So far so good. This was probably my most passive month in eve so far. The most time I spent was 6 hours was re-setting up my eighteen planets for P2- with 2 extractors, 4 basic processors, 2 advanced procesors, launchpad, storage and 6 harvester heads on each extractor. Maybe it sounds little bit like rocket science, but anybody who does this type of work will understand it -- the purpose was to get the best passive setup for 14 day cycles tested and calculated.

The trade market finished about 20 orders which I haven't had a chance to replace yet. I intend to hang on to them and make few little improvments if I get an afternoon or two in next few months. A few meta 4 items did sell for good profit, so completely happy how things with margins are working out.

I also got one of my capital ship BPOs on ME 10, and am now getting PE in place.

Parasoja's Notes:

I logged in even less than he did this month.

Trade contributor: September 2014

I figured out a few new modules which could possibly sell, restocked the market with t1 frigates, and managed to lose my machariel (however, this ship has made me enough kills to pay itself off, so I consider it should be cool).

Both of the station parasites from the last two months are pretty much dead. I decreased profits on some of my modules almost to Jita price, dropping my market estimate by about 1,5-2 bil, which I think is the reason my margins were down. Poor animals didn't have any ISK to eat, so they starved to death. Also I did manage to get my market estimate towards 90 bil.

Nullsec brings me little advantage on customs offices. I use a combination of interbus and player owned customs offices and make something like 7-8 mil per planet per 3 day cycle. It should make something like 300 mil per character once I get my planet managment skills 5/5/5/5.

Parasoja's notes:

Funny story -- on the 5th of November, EVE exceeded 10 billion journal transactions. This broke my program.

The reason it did this is because I didn't convert the journal transaction IDs to integers before sorting the list. If you sort an integer, it sorts smaller numbers first. If you sort a string, it sorts numbers that start with 1 before numbers that start with 9.

Anyhoo, with the competitors disappearing sales and profits are up even though margins are down. Interested to see what happens next month.

Skill point thing

Fun fact: That thing that happens when there's a word you know but can't quite seem to recall at the moment is called presque vu. There's a word I want to use in place of "thing" in the title but can't quite remember. The closest I can come is "waypoint" or "record".

Anyhoo. My characters combined have over 300 million SP, but this is the first one to break 100 individually. The first person in eve to pass 100 million did so shortly after I started playing the game. That was seven years ago, four years after the game started.

Project: Crius research pilot

The prices of researched blueprints haven't crashed at all yet, so it's time to do a trial run and see what happens. With my hull research project in progress I still have 39 slots available for for-profit research. I'll be researching blueprints to 9/18, 10/18, and 10/20 to see which is the most profitable over time, so I've bought three each of 13 blueprints which should provide a good range of data.

(I actually started this almost a month ago and haven't gotten around to posting it until now)

Trade contributor: August 2014 report

 

I sold some of my assets and expanded market litle bit more with medium sized ships and modules. Some less frequently sold modules already made a little profit, so I guess the move was in right direction. Other than that, I bought a few sets of industrial blueprints. They are pretty cheap to buy, don't cost a lot to upgrade, and make a nice profit from 3-10 mil per slot per month (at least in my experience)

I also expanded my family by 1 character. I plan to skill him out for blueprint research, planetary interaction (which i am currently building up at my system), and upgrading his science and research agents (maximum efficiency 6 lvl 4 agents can make profit about 18-25 mil per character per month -- not too good, but completely passive income).

Parasoja's notes:

The difference in profit between this month and last is 1.1%. I'm thinking it can only possible be that consistent by chance, but I guess we'll see.

People seem to like the mobile medium warp disruptors. They were the most profitable item last month as well.

Also, the contributor is apparently amusing himself by swatting other players in his system, forcing them to dock up and buy from him. He included a killmail and some market data in this month's update, but anonymizing it enough to post would have meant blacking out everything.

Any questions for the contributor can be left in comments

Project: Capital hull research

I checked various locations, and have found that it is substantially cheaper to research blueprints in player-owned outposts. In light of this I have decided that I will be putting optimal research into my hull blueprints, which would have been very expensive in highsec.

There are plenty of outposts in providence where anybody can dock. The trouble is that player-owned outposts don't always stay under the control of the same players, so it may at some point become impossible to dock at whatever outpost I do research at. Fortunately, this issue can be solved by keeping a ship and jump clone in the station. All my characters will have a clone there, and I've decided that three of them will have blockade running tengus: One to evac blueprints that finish quickly, one for slow blueprints, and one scout who will inevitably be locked out when I undock without noticing that system ownership has changed.

Also of note, research implants are useful now. If I research my nyx bpo to ME10, a 5% implant will save me 300 million.

I probably won't research my nyx bpo to ME10.

Anyhow, I've got my hull prints in an outpost and am moving characters into position now.

What happens to industry jobs when the station they're in gets conquored?

Anybody know? I'm looking at starting up research again, and the answer to this question has impressively dire implications. When I unrented an office recently it said that any jobs installed from that office would fail and be delivered to impound, rather than completing first. An ownership change presumably unrents offices, same as it revokes clone contracts, and according to evelopedia items in impound are undeliverable if the new owners don't allow you to rent offices there.

Research costs real money now, so if jobs from personal hangars also fail, that's pretty bad for me. If the blueprints are then delivered to impound, that's very, very bad for me. So if anybody has an answer to this, please share.

Alternatively, if anybody knows somebody who owns a station and who would be willing to experiment, we should be able to test this just by playing with standings.

Whoops

"The price of labs crashed, obviously, so I'm going to have to wait to sell those."

Like a week after I wrote that I slapped myself upside the head and worked out how much labs cost to build. The answer is 55m.

I bought 177 labs for between 29 and 36 million, set up a buy order, and started walking the price back up. So far it's up to 48m. I expect to make a profit of about 3.8b.

Trade contributor: July 2014 report

This month I had a competitor on the station, trying to undercut me on about half my sell orders. I've already re-priced my modules twice, and I suspect it won't be too hard to win once I decrease my profits enough. I don't think he can sustain this for long -- I have sources for making a profit even when module prices are low, while he seems to have logistics problems, either using blockade runners or chartering Black Frog. Once he stops making money the price war will be pointless for him, same as the ones I've met before. Just another parasite to squish.

Parasoja's Notes:

A monthly profit of 2.6% on an investment of 50b sounds small, and it is. Thing is it's a long term investment. When I abandoned my trade project I just left my stuff on the market -- and almost all of it sold eventually

Black frog moves a maximum of 5b at a time, and charges 4-16% of a freight contract's collateral. If a trader uses them, their profit margins will be reduced by that much.

Any questions for the contributor can be left in comments.

Trade contributor: Introduction

About a month ago somebody approached me about a trade project he was running, wanting to share his numbers while remaining anonymous for ~opsec~ reasons.

Similar to my own project from way back, he's running an NPC nullsec market hub to supply primarily the local pvp types. The goal of this sort of thing is to achieve good margins with extremely low effort, and the tradeoff is that actual monthly volume is pretty low. In contrast to my project he's gone much bigger: He stocks at least twice as many item types (300ish), and many more of those items, keeping a total of about 70b (50ish at Jita price) on the market. He has also refined the process by establishing rules about not buying things that are selling above average in Jita, and overstocking things that are selling substantially below average.

The contributor has given me the API keys of his market characters, and will be available to answer questions. My role is to use the API keys to work out how much he's making and to maek post. I've sorted out a trade tool which, while imprecise, seems to be more or less working, so we should have some data for you shortly.

Only mostly dead

So here's what's been going on:

My research jobs finished, and I pulled down the tower. The price of labs crashed, obviously, so I'm going to have to wait to sell those.

Capital ship prices didn't increase as much as expected (though there is still time). It seems like most of the capital teams have been hired by nullsec players, so it's possible that production there is increasing as much as we were concerned it might.

I engaged in a point of patch speculation which may have turned out reasonably well for me. Nothing solid yet, but if the market stays like it is right now I could make a little over 35b.

The large new fees for doing research may have increased the value of existing researched capital ship hull blueprints substantially. Unfortunately I have no way to calculate this, so I no longer really have any idea what my net worth is.

The large new fees for doing research also mean that putting my hull blueprints into research toward 10/20 would be super expensive. I haven't yet decided whether to go through with this.

Finally, a contributor exists. A reader who is running a trade project thought I might be interested, and I'm working on producing some numbers.

Looking forward

What to do next?

I think I'd like to shoot some people.

Now, the problem I have with pvp is that most of the time it doesn't mean anything. People don't run out of money, and they expect to lose their ships, so it doesn't matter to them when if actually happens. At least that's the case in null and WH, and lowsec is literally fight club.

As far as I'm concerned, pvp that doesn't affect the other person's gameplay is pointless and dreary. I can't affect people in nullsec, or low, or WH, but maybe I can in high.

I'd like to see if I can kill a corporation, so I'm going to see how I like highsec wardecs. To this end I've dropped my combat characters from my industrial corp to create "Eden Frontier", and will be searching for a target for a trial run.

In which the shutdown proceeds apace

Just installed my tower's last research jobs. My last component manufacturing runs are finishing up, and all but two of my hull runs have been installed. Unfortunately those two won't make it in until after the patch, which will likely cost me a few components. Shouldn't be a big deal.

I'm thinking a little about things I could do for passive income after the patch. There are a few types of blueprints which take long enough to research that they might still be worth something, but I won't know for sure until after things settle down. I have enough isk to invest that I could make enough for plex on a monthly return of as little as 0.4% -- I just have to find something to put the money into.

Winding down capital production

Moved my last load of minerals to lowsec. My plan right now is to wait for prices to normalize post-patch and then see if it would be worth it to restart production.

It's quite likely that hull prices will spike like crazy when the patch hits - for a bit, at least - so I'm probably going to lose out on quite a bit of profit by not building through the patch. I just, you know, have enough money that the payoff isn't worth the effort of correcting all the builds I have in progress when the patch hits.

Unicorns

I've been selling researched capital component blueprints for nearly three years now, and it's a fairly regular occurrence for somebody to contact me about one, usually asking if they can buy it for just a little less. These people are scammers. I've never gotten a legitimate offer for a blueprint.

Recently I was once again contacted by somebody, but instead of wanting to pay less they want me to get in touch with them to negotiate a price for moving the blueprint to a different system before they bought it. Obviously they were going to try a gank, so I moved it in my blockade-gu without trying to negotiate a fee and set up a contract for jita price.

They accepted the contract, then sent me an extra 70m for moving it. For surprising me I sent back the 70m plus all the blueprint profits.

Not halting capital production just yet

Capital prices are shooting up, presumably in advance of the industry changes, and the changes themselves have been pushed back to 2 months from the time of posting. At this time I am NOT shutting down production. Unfortunately I'm a little short on liquidity after buying the titan blueprint, but I do have a few runs worth of isk sitting around.

There will have to be a shutdown after the patch, though. Even if the market remains solid continuing will mean refactoring my entire process, and whether or not I have the motivation to do that is unknown.

Research: Step-down and cleanup

The markets for capital component and hull blueprints are flooded with people trying to sell well researched blueprints for not very much more than NPC price. I haven't been buying blueprints since the devblog, and I'm selling off researched prints (the ones I can, anyway) and taking everything else out of research as soon as it hits 10/10, to sell post-patch. The tower will come down once all the slots are empty.

Some of my research will continue post-patch. I'll plan to be working on a set of optimal hull blueprints despite the 4 year ETA (I've been playing for nearly twice that long already), and I may as well put some more research on my supercapital prints since I can't do anything else with them.

Another devblog

Keep it up guys. The more obfuscated crap you add to a game the better it is.

Okay, let's do this

Devblog.


Slots:

 Having slots available for everybody may well just straight up sink the research market.

Copying:

Copy time now equals build time, which means my 67.5 billion isk ragnarok blueprint will produce no profits. Oh, and since everybody who copies them will be looking to sell theirs, it's now nyx-BPO-level toxic. We already knew this, but I feel like it bears repeating.

ME/PE:

There are now 10 levels of these. Each level grants the same bonus (1% for ME, 2% for PE), but the time increases logrithmically with each level. Researching level 9 to level 10 takes 2500 times longer than level 0 to level 1.

EDIT: I was wrong about research times for component blueprints. If the market survives they might still be viable.

Under the "converting old blueprints to new blueprints" section, we see that in order to become ME10 under the new system, blueprints must be ME10 under the old system. This means that all my optimal capital ship blueprints are now ME9, except for the thanatos. And, oh, by the way, it takes 4 years to research a capital blueprint to ME10.

tl;dr

I'll be lucky to make zero profit on 200 billion isk of my current investments.

tl;dr tl;dr ccp makes changes to my activities in eve

Le devblog

• Remove the ability for players to use stations to safely store their blueprints without putting them at risk in Starbase structures.

I could keep using a tower, but it would mean logging in twice a day to make sure I haven't been wardecced. Maybe I should just join a renter corp; nullsec stations get the same bonus as pos labs, and it'll be a lot safer.

• Reduce copy time on all blueprints to be less time consuming than manufacturing something out of it. This gives the option to use blueprint copies to build items at Starbases without risking the original.

This drops the copy time on titan prints by at least three quarters. That would be fine if the demand could keep up, but it can't. So that investment just turned toxic.

Suddenly I'm real tired of having to work around CCP.

An hold

Mineral prices are up about 5%, while ship prices have continued to fall. This is bad news for my margins. I've put a hold on both buying minerals and selling ships until they stabilize, because there are two possible explanations.

One: The increase in mineral prices is due to increased demand because of B-R. In this case, it will take prices long enough to subside that ship prices will rise to meet mineral prices in the meantime. In this case I should keep buying minerals, but put a hold on sales until prices rise.

Two: The increase in mineral prices is speculation in advance of the refining changes. In this case mineral prices will subside before hull prices can rise to meet them, and I should keep selling hulls but put a hold on buying minerals.

Refining and compression changes

Devblog.

What this means for me is that I have to use compressed ore instead 425mm railguns to get minerals to my manufacturing station. There's too little ore on the market right now for this, but hopefully that will change after the patch.

Calculating the ores I need to produce a particular quantity of minerals is going to be a PITA, but I can probably do it with a spreadsheet.

I'm going to need a lowsec reprocessing tower. Can probably use a small and leave it offline when it's not in use.

Also, lowsec manufacturers can build for less than highsec manufacturers, and nullsec manufacturers can build for less than lowsec manufacturers. This could be a problem for me if somebody builds capitals in null and exports them to high. Doing that would be quite a lot of work, though, so hopefully it won't force me to shut down or anything.

[Reporting interval] financial report

Well, I guess this is what I get for not logging in for a month.

No, srs -- I let my contracts lapse without making new ones, adjusted market orders maybe twice toward the beginning of the reporting period, and the damn thing still handed me 10 bil. It's getting embarrasing.

[Reporting interval] financial report

Another month, another whatever.

Part of the reason for the difference between net income and delta net worth is that I sold off some exploration gear.

Exploration in hostile nullsec for the chronically risk-averse (Rubicon edition)

Since CCP changed salvage and whatever sites, "exploration" seems to have taken on a new meaning as something you can do in a frigate. Here, we're going to do real exploration. This method will allow you to take off from jita 4-4, fly out to the edge of the galaxy, whack a couple combat sites to see what falls out, and fly back to jita, all in near-perfect safety.

The post-AI-changes iteration of ninja exploration, which dual-boxed a billion isk stealth bomber and an RR tengu, was silly as shit. Luckily for us, the introduction of the mobile depot removes the need for the bomber, making ninja exploration a proper easy-mode profession.

The fits:

This is your scanning fit:

• Note: The cargo expanders let you run another site or two before you run out of missiles. If you aren't super confident about your cloaking skills, you could consider switching them for warp stabs.

This is your site-running fit:

•  Note: This is a cheap fit, and at times you will have to run the AB and orbit something to reduce incoming damage. Using shiny modules can increase your tank and damage, make it easier to achieve cap stability, and so on.
•  Note: Assuming you're doing guristas sites, once you realize that only the DED 6/7/8 are worth doing you will want to switch to mostly scourge fury missiles, and just keep a few navy scourge for clearing large groups of sub-BC.

Your cargo should look like this:

• Note: Unlike previous builds, I did not include a codebreaker (data analyzer). This is because the sites formerly referred to as LADAR hacking sites now use that silly hacking minigame. Even if they can still drop the neurotoxin control book, they take several times longer to run and half the time it will be destroyed anyway. I deem them no longer worth the effort. This is a modest exploration nerf.

To maek isks:

Scan down a site, launch the mobile depot at a safe spot, and use its' cargo bay and fitting service to refit as follows:

-Move missiles to depot
-Remove 2 cargo expander
-Remove probe launcher
-Remove cloaking device
-Switch locus analyzer for efficiency gate
-Switch covert reconfig for accelerated ejection bay
-Switch interdiction nullifier for fuel catalyst
-Fit 4x BCU
-Fit 2x launcher
-Move missiles to cargo

Then re-online your modules and run the site. When you finish, do the same refitting steps in reverse and scoop the depot. If somebody enters the system while you're doing the site, pound dscan until they leave. If you see probes, warp to your depot, quickly refit, scoop your depot, and warp off. Delete the safe and make a new one.

Sauce: Last room of the 7/10

Other thoughts:

Since the exploration changes, apparently space near empire is full of newbies running around in scanning frigates. They'll constantly be interrupting you, and if you ignore them you're going to end up murdered by a black ops fleet, so I recommend heading toward the edge of the galaxy until they aren't a problem.

Also, you can only run 3 to 6 sites before running out of missiles. Operating out of an NPC station where somebody stocks them will let you stay out much longer.

Flux trading: Or, you can save 0.375% by buying on Thursdays

So I noticed that some commodities seem to have a regular fluctuation in price over the course of a week -- they're lowest toward the end of the week, rise over the weekend, and then fall again until the end of the week. This suggests that you could make money by buying at one point in the week and selling at another point.

Obviously this is a horrible idea, but I wanted to see if it would work. To do this, I took average daily price data from the client and used magic to compare prices on days of the week to prices on other days of the week for each week for each week of the year.

Commodities:

Plex: Over the course of the year plex have risen in price from 560 to 630 million. Going up makes it a lot easier to make a profit, but buying on saturday and selling on Tuesday yields a sum increase between those days over the course of the year of 335 million, or 6.5 million per unit (1%).

Isogen: Over the course of the year isogen has fallen from 150 to 130 isk per unit, more than negating the effect of rising prices. Buying on Thursday and selling on Saturday yields an average profit of 0.6 isk per unit (0.5%). Pointless in terms of profit, but I'm super impressed that it yielded a positive number.

Megacyte: Dropped from 2100 to 1600 over the course of the year. Buying on Friday and selling on Saturday makes an average of 14 isk per unit (0.9%).

Minmatar fuel block: Mostly steady over the course of the year. Buying on Thursday and selling on Monday yields an average profit of 122 isk per unit (1%).

Hobgoblin II: Buy on Friday, sell on Tuesday. Average profit is a massive 2700 isk per unit (0.5%).

Raven: Buy on Thursday, sell on Monday. Average profit 900k (0.6%).

Does it work?

Well, not by enough to beat the tax rate. Plus, I'm picking the buy and sell days that maximize profit over the last year, but I don't know if there's necessarily a reason they are low and high on those days or if I'm just cherrypicking the data. Even if this does work, it's just margin trading with longer durations and slightly higher margins.

Decided to go for it

Increasing my maximum investment

I've had isk building up lately and nothing to invest it in. I need an opportunity which will increase the size and return of my total investment, ideally without adding effort.

This brings me back, after many years, to the idea of copying titan blueprints. But first, some rumination:

If I invest 1.2 billion isk in a capital component blueprint, I spend 1.81 months researching it and then sell it for a profit of maybe 144 million isk, which comes to 12% APM (monthly profit). More APM is better, but the size of the investment also matters: If I make 100% APM on an investment of a million isk, my profit after a month is fuck all. If I make 12% on an investment of 1.2 billion, my profit is 144 million. If I make 5% on an investment of 120 billion, as I would be if I kept my capital manufacturing process running at capacity, then I make 6 billion.

Larger investments have lower APM. You could keep your investments small, but there's a limit to how many you can have going at once. If I put my entire net worth into capital component blueprint research I could make 48 billion per month*, but I would need 300 material research slots, which is 7 large towers, and 10 accounts, to keep it going. While fueling 7 towers and installing a thousandish research runs per 1.81 months isn't impossible, it would get old quickly.

If we want to increase income without increasing the number of slots we run, we have to make a larger per-slot investment at the cost of lower APM. The trick here is that you can't increase your investment by more than your APM decreases -- if investment doubles but APM halves, you're making the same amount of money.

So let's look at copying titan blueprints:



I'll do the math for you: A ragnarok blueprint increases per-slot investment by a factor of 56, while decreasing APM by a factor of 9. This yields 6x the income per slot. The downside is that 144 million times 6 is not a huge number, and getting that return eats a vast amount of liquidity. Liquidity is a Good Thing.

Just eyeballing the BPC market it looks like I could probably put over a trillion isk into titan blueprints before I crash it, so it is something I could dump profits into for a very long time indeed.

*This would actually just crash the market.

[reporting interval] financial report

Two-fifths of a trillion is a milestone I guess.