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.