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.