Lost and Found

When my PC died in July I was able to get back up and running very quickly thanks to maintaining my data on a server rather than the PC. One thing that wasn't stored remotely was the data for jEVEAssets that I'd been using for nearly two years to track assets over all my characters.

 

It wasn't a major loss as until this week I haven't had the need to locate assets out of game (either due to being offline or not able to find something via the in-game asset system) but the last couple of days I have found myself wishing I had reinstalled it.

 

One Not Four

 

I was doing high sec to null sec courier contracts for friends the past two nights, nothing major but with Bagodan being a ganking hotspot, I no longer autopilot and have exit cyno's online the whole trip now, I tend to remain watching the overview window and using zKillboard and the in-game map to see possible issues ahead.

 

One stop last night was to collect a contract but it was in one of my former base stations and I haven't visited it for several months. On docking I accepted the contract and then went to move it into my cargo bay.

 

Except I stopped, instead of one item (the courier contract) I had four items and a total value of around six billion ISK.

Wait. What is this.

 

Looking at the three assets I wasn't expecting it appears that, at some point, previously I've docked and unloaded a full JF of materials from my towers and then promptly forgotten about them. It's possible I intended to further "value add" by making something from the materials but I've obviously forgotten about them until today.

 

So I contracted the items to my trading alt and then used a freight service to move them for sale in a market hub.

 

Six billion ISK is not to be sneezed at, it's not a huge amount to a trader but that's actually come at a good time as I'm trying to get start-up funds for a new venture and this will be a nice float for that.

 

Hold Up, You Missed More

 

As a result of finding these I went through the assets of my characters and found more "unaccounted" assets spread around New Eden. Some notable finds included:

• one character with full set (one of each race) of unfit Command/Fleet Ships with fittings
• one character having 21 fighters/fighter bombers yet this character could not fly capitals
• over 200 blueprint copies in a station in a system I don't ever remember visiting before
• two Providence freighters that I did not know I owned

When I get home tonight I will be installing jEVEAssets and spending some time running though the results of all assets on all my characters and I'm sure that I'll have to send a pilot out to collect all that I find.

 

I am thank that I haven't had any regional buy orders for minerals for a few weeks otherwise I'd be really screwed with picking up all that in Market Deliveries.

Getting on the bandwagon

It's that time of year again where everyone who has something to sell is advertising that they have are having some form of "MEGA BONUS UBER ONE TIME ONLY SALE". It can be a little overwhelming or just plain annoying if you see the same adverts over and over again.

Almost a Fire Sale

This year I decided that I would join in but instead of advertising I'd just drop the price of my items as if I was having a fire sale. Not everything I trade was covered but all my T1/T2 modules and ships. Thanks to some unknown person who has cleared up the Metamaterials and Sylramic Fibres market these too were included.

From the 20th December to 2pm (AU TZ) I've been selling over three thousand items in both High Sec and Null Sec at under market price. As of 2pm today this is my trader's wallet:

Normally I try to keep as little ISK as possible in my wallet but in three days I've gone from a little under 1.5b to almost 10.5b ISK, 

Why Do This

Aside from the title, I wanted to clear out my current stock of items in my locations because they were annoying me and I was a little tired of the 0.01 ISK price updates I'd have to do several times a day. By dropping the price to well under market I may have lost some profit but I sold the item and no longer have to keep trying to sell it.

By selling it I now have ISK I can use to invest in the New Year on things that will generate me more profit. Believe me, I've spent the past two weeks looking for new opportunities for 2015.

Don't be afraid of Long Term when Trading

Most (~95%) of the trading that I do in High Sec is based on short time scales. I buy low, sell at a higher price to make a reasonable profit and I list items either for a week or fortnight but never longer than a month. Prices are checked anything up to a dozen times a day depending on the item for sale. Null sec is slightly different in that I list items for 3 months and check the prices once or twice a week.

My aim is to make at least 20% profit on anything I sell and for 95% it happens within a day or two of listing.

There are some (~5%) items that I sell that I know will take a longer term to sell either because they are a rarity or have a high price with a low volume. I avoid Deadspace/Officer items as well as Storyline modules, outside of a couple of them they do not have a sale volume to justify the expense of buying them and then sitting on them.

A while back I noticed that Mobile Tractor Units were good sellers and the named ones, whilst not selling in hundreds or thousands a day, were selling in good quantities and for good a good profit.

Why Mobile Tractor Unit's

Mobile Tractor Units are common and come in three variants (base and two named) with the differences coming down to tractor beam speed and maximum range. The base unit ("Mobile Tractor Unit") is cheap (~5m ISK) and available in large quantities, the next model up ("Packrat") is about ~22m ISK for a small increase in tractor beam speed. Finally we have the top model ("Magpie") which comes in at a whopping 300/350m ISK for a 40% increase in range and a much faster tractor beam.

I've rarely seen Magpie's in use but they are sold fairly regularly.

Manufacturing

The blueprints are available in certain Data/Relic sites and a couple of months ago I saw five BPC's for sale in Jita for between 250m and 280m ISK. The material requirements were the same for all of them (from memory) and it appeared that the price of the BPC was what was controlling the final price, which at the time was 400m ISK.

I worked out that, at 400m, I could easily produce these for less than 300m ISK with BPC prices as they were. I was helped by several friends producing the PI materials used so I was able to obtain what i needed at a significant discount on market price.

So I bought the five BPC's for just over 1 billion ISK, bought all the materials needed and shipped them to my manufacturing system for production.

Long Term Sale

I've built 5 Magpie MTU's and as of two days ago the final one sold after just over two months on the market (in total). I listed all at 1m ISK under the lowest Sell Order price with a lowest limit of 325m ISK. 

If the price dipped under this I remained at 325m and it did several times but within a few days recovered to head back up to 325m ISK at which point my unit sold and the price continued to climb to just over 340m ISK.

All the Magpies sold within two months of listing:

Magpie #1 - 331m

Magpie #2 - 325m

Magpie #3 - 325m

Magpie #4 - 334m

Magpie #5 - 325m

I received 1.64b ISK in total and my production costs were 1.31b ISK leaving me with a nice profit of 330m ISK or a nice even 25% profit.

Two months isn't very long in trading (CCP said that there was one sell order for an item in-game that had such a low database id it showed it was set up in 2006 and had been modified ever since) but remember that sometimes things won't sell immediately so you need to hold on to them until they do.

Even Scams should be spell checked

This is a couple of days old but I blocked the character so I don't know if its still like this but whilst in Jita the night that Rhea was deployed I saw the following appearing in Local:

Theta requires armor tanked ships! Typhoon Fleet Issue with Missile Rigs for only 410 million ISK! Save 10 million isk off current market value! Show some love to the Minmatar!

Can you see the error?

Seems like a deal but I cannot get past the first word without cringing, Thera is the name of the new wormhole system NOT Theta.

Sure its a simple typo, T is next to the R on a QWERTY keyboard but it just shows a lack of professionalism from a scammer.

They want our ISK but are too lazy to do a basic spell check, scammers today eh. Back in my day it was different ;)

Edit: Thanks to commenter Chinana who pointed out my own spell check failure.

Grinding for Jita

Not that kind of grinding, this is a continuation of trying to get standings for my Jita alt to the highest possible in order to benefit from a lowering of my brokering fees.

Lower Broker Fees

At the moment my Jita alt has standings of 4.05 with Caldari Navy which allows him to have a 0.10% reduction in Broker fees (0.65% vs. 0.75%). I do a large proportion of my buying/selling in Jita so the lower I can make this the better. At least I think it is.

I haven't done much with about this since I got the standings to 4.05 via a combat alt running missions for Caldari Navy. I won't bore you with the details (which I recorded) but it took about three days of missioning in a Vexor Navy Issue and a lot of patience with Level 3 missions.

My friend Althanear pointed me TSCA and their "standing correction service" and I was considering using it but reading Merchant Monarchy on Tuesday I was pleasantly surprised to see MoxNix do a fantastic post on how he was thinking of doing the same and he even went as far as mention Caldari Data Agents.

Data Centers

"This is a standard Data Center, built-in with a long range scanner to search for interesting phenomenon in the solar-system. They are usually packed with tourists and holiday-goers but have also been known to attract agents looking to hire freelancers for various tasks. These Data Centers were first produced by the Gallente corporation The Scope, but have since been mimicked by corporations in other nations due to their popularity."

There are Data Centres for each of the major empires that give a significant boost to faction standings for turning in a quantity of specific tags. No mission to run, you just turn up with tags convo the agent and accept the mission to provide the tags.

Standings get an immediate boost for a modest ISK investment, because you'll need to buy enough from the market, and whilst you can only do it once the boost you get is worth the cost of any tags. If you use buy orders you can save money but I just bought straight off the market (all tags I would need cost me just over 250m ISK) and it was easily worth it based on the long term savings.

One thing to note, if you want to get standings for use in Jita use only the Caldari Navy agents and not the Home Guard ones. Positive standings are good but you'll only benefit in Jita 4-4 from the standings to Caldari Navy.

*UPDATE* A comment from MoxNix shows I was wrong in what I was sayingwhen I believed that it was Station Owner standings that were more important than faction for altering the broker fee. Turns out the Faction has more weight than the station owner.

So I'm off back to Data Centers with more tags for more standings :)

Should I Do It

If you're going ot be using a trading alt in a major trade hub I'd say its worth getting their standings up to at least 6 with the owner of the station. The better the standings the the better the bottom line will be.

If you can spare a little ISK and some time (less than an hour) to do Data Centers then I don't see any reason why not to do it. If you have a PvE character who can run missions for the owner of the station you can do that and share any bounties and standings increases with your trading alt as well.

In time you'll save a lot more ISK than you spend.

Lowering Broker Fees

I've previously mentioned that I was looking to see if I could save more ISK by lowering further the 0.75% broker fee incurred when setting up Sell Orders on my Trading Alt.

 

I'm happy to report that I've managed to lower this to 0.70% as of today but I don't believe I will get this to what I thought was the lowest level of 0.1875%.

 

0.7% Broker's fee and dropping

Standings were increased by being in fleet with an Alt missioning for Caldari Navy and then sharing the rewards when completing the mission. For Level 1/2 missions this was frustratingly slow, but training Connections to IV and Social to IV on my Trading Alt improved the rate at which I gained standings.

 

A little extra training to make the standings increase faster

The 0.05% reduction in my Broker Fees seems to correlate with a 2.00 standing that I have with the Caldari Navy. Based on this I believe I should see a maximum reduction of 0.05% per 2.00 standings, meaning a total reduction of 0.25% or a final figure for Broker Fees of 0.50%.

 

Current standings after a weekend of grinding

It's not a huge amount but over trades I do a month this will add up to be several tens of million ISK and that's no longer being removed from my wallet.

 

 

How Are You?

A friend asked me last night on TeamSpeak how was I and how was life now I'd left Providence.

 

I answered things were good, lots of things happening, and it was nice and quiet now I'd left Providence. I had a few things to do last night so here's a more expanded version of the answer I gave him:

 

Quiet

 

Last night every single chat channel was quiet and devoid of people. Normally the channels I idle in have between 10 and 20 people in them, last night the most any had was three, four if you include my main and the various alts I logged in at different times.

 

I expect this type of situation on  Monday night for me, as it's either very early Monday morning in Europe or late Sunday night in later time zones. This is the time most people aren't logged in and it's useful for me as it's a great time to do logistics or move freighters around in areas you normally wouldn't use them.

 

Consolidation

 

As it was quiet I used the time last night to send a couple of characters around New Eden to pickup buy orders and collect materials on various characters for consolidation in a single station. I base myself out of one system so it's very useful to have 99% of my assets located here, albeit spread over all my characters.

 

Two Providences and a Prorator were sent out to collect the assets, in total 146 jumps would need to be made between three characters. Slightly more jumps for the freighters but the Prorator still had to run the gauntlet of low sec for three jumps so it wasn't all popcorn and movies.

 

It took a little over four hours but every jump was completed, without incident, and I managed to get all the assets back to my staging system. Even managed to reprocess quite a bit of the T1 and meta modules I received into minerals for my production lines.

 

Projects

 

I have three major projects and one minor, on-going, project on the go at the moment (the names are just for easy remembering):

 

Project Vixen

 

Three years of research, asset buying and training have gone into this project. I'm still a month or two away from being able to pass Milestone 3. Milestone 1 was passed just before Christmas 2013 when I was able to finish all the training I needed to and Milestone 2 was completed just after New Year when I managed to get all the ISK together (two investors and a lot of savings/PvE Bounties) to finance the project.

 

Project Make Stuff

 

Comprises all my Tower and manufacturing operations, the aim is to provide income for my other projects as well as some passive income (in tax form) for my alliance .

 

Project LP

 

I'm in the process of reskilling a Minmatar character to have the best Social skills with the aim of using him to do PvE for LP for corporations/factions that I've identified have high value/profit BPC's available in their LP stores. It's more PvE but instead of grinding for standings this is specifically aimed at getting LP for rewards and something I'll do in batches.

 

Project Minerals

 

I'm using buy orders in a lot of new player systems and a few other highly populated mission running ones to purchase salvage (to make rigs) and loot that I can then reprocess into minerals for use in my projects.

 

Blueprints

 

I've amassed a nice collection of T1/T2 BPC's and am slowly working out what I will need to produce goods from them. Logically the input materials will have both a high cost and size but profit margins look to be between 10% and 30% depending on the items and where I'll sell them.

 

Previously I would have sold a large amount in Providence but as I'm now out of there I'm having to look at market hubs but also now I'm in Curse there is a thriving market there that I can move a lot of items via. Time will tell but my aim at the moment is to work through the blueprints I have before I look at selling anything.

The Trading Alt

marketsforISK is a blog that I do enjoy reading, I'm jealous of their ability and patience for dealing with the market. If only I had 1% of that I'd be space richer...

A post that caught my eye was this one, where croda provides some ideas for people wanting to get into trading along with some real world examples. Props to croda for doing this but his suggestion for making a trading alt is something I cannot +1 enough.

About six months ago I decided I needed a trading alt in order handle my buying and selling. This way I could minimise taxation along with having a single character who had my ISK and goods for sale.

About

Six months, three PLEX (for dual character training) and three hundred million ISK for skill books later ZGG Business Associate is active and trading.

• 5.5m SP, with 95% of that in Trade and 0.025% in Neural Enhancement (for jump clones).
• 3 jump clones, one in Jita, one in Providence and one in Curse.
• Wealth, including that in the Corporation wallet he controls, of over 70 billion ISK and slowly rising

He is responsible for all my buying and selling in the systems he is in and uses Red Frog Freight to do all moving. I don't think he's left any station since June last year when I created all his jump clones via a Rorqual.

Is it worth it

Yes, definitely. The ability to login to a dedicated character for all my market activities has been so worth the investment. The amount I've saved in taxes over this time has meant he's paid for all his skills and the three PLEX used for training already and it's just gravy now.

Moving Cargo

Most of my characters can fly freighters and those that cannot are only a few days away from being able to, should I need them to. As a result I do move a lot of cargo myself and with Low-Grade Nomad implants not as slow as it used to be.

 

That said there are times when I don't want to (read: can't be bothered), cannot or wish to mitigate risk by using a 3rd party service. In the case of the latter I use Red Frog Freight and a very happy customer am I.

 

Red Frog Freight, for when it absolutely, positively must arrive.

 

Their rules for use are simple and when I have made a mistake during the setup of the contract I've been contacted by someone very quickly with details of the mistake for me to fix. The Trip Calculator is simple and provides the whole cost of the contract you'll pay, all you have to do is fill in the Courier Contract details with what the calculator states and what collateral you want to secure the cargo.

 

They say that it may take up to 3 days for any contract to be accepted and then 1 day to complete, I've never had a contract last more than 24 hours. I find setting contracts just before I logout for a night results in my cargo being where I need by the time I wake up, that's service.

 

I use Red Frog at least six times a week, mostly moving items from my high sec staging system to Jita or vice versa. The benefit, apart from the overnight movement is I don't have to worry about the Niarja pipe (the 0.5 system between Amarr to Jita where a lot of suicide ganking occurs).

 

Setting collateral to cover any cargo I am moving (I never move more than 1 billion ISK per contract, and insure it for its actual value) will see me still benefit if it is lost but, touch wood, I've not had that happen. Nor have I had a contract stolen by someone within Red Frog. I'm lucky I guess.

 

So if you're new to EVE and want to move large amounts of cargo around and mitigate some of the risk I'd recommend giving Red Frog Freight a try.

 

Setting up a Market Trading Alt

It was an idea formed after reading the blog Merchant Monarchy. Previously all my sales had been handled by each character with only one having any decent trading skills.

All that changed when I started reading Merchant Monarchy and realised I should invest time and an alt slot in creating a market trading. The, fairly recent, introduction of Dual Character Training meant I now could train another character without having to stop training on a main character.

Plan

I worked out that my only costs would consist of:

• skill books
• increased clone limit of 7m SP
• a couple of jump clones 
• PLEX for each month I want to train

I figured no more than 3 months of PLEX would be needed (EVE Mon was used to plan the skill queue) and there were only a few skill books needed. I should be able to setup a character for no more than a 2 billion investment.

Result

Well just under 2 billion ISK and three PLEX later the trading alt is now living in Jita with jump clones in two other locations where I sell items.

The Trading skills I've got are now at the following levels:

• Accounting V
• Broker Relations V
• Contracting IV
• Corporation Contracting IV
• Daytrading V
• Margin Trading IV
• Marketing IV
• Procurement IV
• Retail V
• Trade V
• Tycoon V
• Wholesale V

And these are enough for my alt, I don't do many buy orders so Margin Trading IV is enough and anything I do buy I tend to get direct from Jita market. 305 sell slots mean I can do a lot of selling, not just in Jita but at the other two locations I plan to.

Moving Assets

I've used Red Frog Freight as well as my own Transportation characters to move stuff to and from jita without issue. Contracts can be setup remotely far from the items and Courier contracts mean things can get transported quickly and efficiently.

Saving Money

The Accounting and Broker Relations skills alone have saved me several hundred million ISK in fees, so worthwhile and having one character control all my buying and selling is much better for my own sanity as I no longer have to remember which character has what to sell/buy.

It may have cost almost 2 billion ISK to setup but I've very nearly recouped that investment in less than 3 months of use. I really wish I'd setup a Market Trading alt earlier.