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.