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.

Should you watch the EVE-Propser Market Show?

EVE-Prosper Market Show

There is no dub-step soundtrack nor is it a static view of the market in Jita but instead there is a video where Lockefox, of EVE-Propser, covers market status, tips and tricks as well as providing analysis and comment on EVE in general.

I did not watch the first episode (but I have now, vov for watching out of order) but I did read the associated blog post after it happened but it was only his post last night, where he addressed both the positive and negative feedback on the show he had received that piqued my interest and got me to actually spend the time to watch it.

I'm not a video blog watcher nor do I listen to any EVE pod casts. Why, because I find most to be poorly presented and lacking any real substance, for the want of better description I find them to be train wrecks. Pieces all over the place, screaming and shouting with very little usefulness. The only one I regularly listen to is EVE Down Under on Friday nights (AU TZ).

Well, Is it a Train Wreck

Far from it, the show is well produced, the presenter knows what he's talking about and more importantly he provides useful information. 

It is very watch able thanks to the experience and knowledge that Lockefox has.

What You See

The Show uses a lot of visuals, after all its on Twitch.tv and YouTube, but some of the visuals are just a waste. 

I don't like is seeing his EVE Client, watching people talking local or enter/leave system is distracting to the eyes and I focus off the audio. Whatever is being displayed should be related to what is being discussed. If you're discussing whats to come in the episode then please, display a list of what is coming not your EVE client with people discussing fights in local. 

I'd much rather see something related to what is being discussed be it a contents page, list of topics, graphs/charts or even a picture of what you're discussing.

Voice of an erm... Angel?

The somewhat gruff North American accent voice is certainly different to what I was hoping for but his voice isn't the annoying fingernails on a blackboard that some would expect. It's funny as now when I read the blog his voice is in my head reading to me.

He sounds like teachers I've had in school and college, they're reading from a script but he's not afraid to sidestep and go off script to provide more and the voice is authoritative.

Wish It Had This

The one feature, especially for YouTube watching, that I feel is a must, is the contents list. The episode contents are laid out at the start but there is no written list that we can refer to and use to jump to specific parts of the show. Either in the show description or better still as slides when its discussed AND then bookmarks in the video that can navigated to.

This to me is a critical oversight but I also know it is a lot of work to manage. Heres hoping that it will be implemented in later shows.

Should I Watch

The show is very good, the content interesting and Lockefox presents it well. I'm not a fan of Twitch.tv (time zone differences don't help) so I always watch via YouTube when it becomes available.

As with any new TV show time must be given for it to settle and develop a rythum, this is no different. Lockefix does a lot of work to produce this show and should be commended for that, years ago I did Shout casts for Battlefield and the shows I helped or presented were far more work than you'd imagine they'd need.

If you do any market activities (buying/selling) then give this Show a look. It may not have a lot for you but you'll be smarter after watching it. I know I was after just one show.

Encouragement

You're never going to please 100% of people so don't even try but you've got a great start and if you enjoy doing it then carry one. You'll pick up new watchers and get constructive feedback from them I'm sure.

Lockefox, please continue producing this show. You're the first, and so far the best, please ignore the haters.

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.

The peril of ignoring my Internal Auditor

I'm rather pissed off at the moment two things happened on Friday, both are my because of something I did. I wasn't drunk, too tired or in any way incapacitated that I could use to explain this, I was just plain stupid for ignoring my internal auditor.

Mistake One

A mistake on one character meant I accepted a contract I should not have whilst I was doing a large courier contract move all because I wasn't paying attention when I saw the contract, I just accepted it. Sorted it out late last night but haven't had a chance to speak to my CEO and make sure he understands it was an accident and make sure we're good.

Mistake Two

But the biggest mistake I made on Friday involved Large and Capital Rigs and cost me, all up, nearly twenty billion ISK in wealth.

The story is long, involves buy/sell orders over four characters at various trade hubs in New Eden, and is not something I wish to share just now in detail. I have taken notes/screenshots and I may write up exactly how stupid I was in-depth for a later post.

But suffice to say, I should have listened to that voice in my head, whom I call my Internal Auditor, who crops up now and again when I'm playing EVE and about to do something obviously stupid but I am still going to...

Shortish Version

I enjoy making rigs, Large and Capital sized because they sell well and I've got good supplies, via Buy Orders, in a few locations of Salvage materials. Blueprint copies can be found easily for Tech 2 rigs and are usually priced well, often I get them for under their actual value. Profits are good on T1 and T2 variants and I've been very happy.

As a result of being undercut each time I added rigs for sale or changed active sell order prices I was undercut, usually by only a tenth of an ISK but as time wore on it was twenty thousand, hundred thousand or in the case of T2 rigs it was millions at a time.

Unfortunately I did not listen to my most vocal stakeholder when they saw what was happening and stop I kept going and I sold a lot of my T1/T2 rigs at less than my alarm level of 4% profit instead of my usual 15%/20%. I'm pretty sure I sold the majority at less than the actual cost price to produce but because I'd made them weeks/months using materials at the time I don't have records any more on the material prices.

To compound the errors I was making in rigs I also was trying to buy more rig blueprint copies, salvage materials and a few other things. I wasn't paying attention and bought more than I needed and in a couple of cases paid far too much for materials.

Lessons

When the rigs started changing prices I should have quit, it was well after DT and I should have gone to bed but I didn't listen to my Internal Auditor and quit when I should have. The end result being I've lost nearly 20 billion in wealth in less than one day.

I've seen where I've gone wrong and I've learnt the lesson, fortunately this wasn't the RL stock market where it would have a seriously implication. 

That isn't to say this doesn't have an impact on EVE for me. I'm going to have to make this money back and a couple of manufacturing projects I was looking into I'm going to have to postpone until I do because I no longer have the liquid ISK available.

I need to make sure I don't make the same mistakes again and I've learnt a hard lesson because I didn't listen to my Internal Auditor.

Epiphany

On my desktop is an icon for jEVEAssets and once a day I run it and do an Update. When it's complete I see my total value and the Tracker allows me to track my my Wallet ISK, Sell/Buy Orders and Overall Worth.

For nearly twelve months that is all I have used it for.

Yesterday I received a comment from a MoxNix who said:

Use the "Market Orders" tool and sort on "Expires" to find which orders will be expiring soonest. Or sort on "Fullfilled" to find the ones that have been bought out (sell orders) or completed filled (buy orders).

Comments are good and I wish (sometimes) I had more as its one of the best ways of knowing if I'm writing well and things people are intersted in. But just as important is Comments are a great way of finding out new things and this comment was one of the latter.

When I got home last night I loaded jEVEAssets and did an Update but instead of just closing it when done I spent some time investigating the interface and trying what MoxNix suggested. 

Eureka!

Johnny Carson agrees I'm an idiot

How the hell did I not know this, why the hell did I not actually play around in jEVEAssets and properly find out what it could and couldn't do. I mean seriously for eleven years my day job was Testing Applications to find out their functionality and limits and here is an application I haven't even scratched 1% of yet.

I spent two hours playing around with jEVEAssets. I found assets I didn't know I had, I found assets I still had in Providence on characters I haven't logged into for over six months. On one character I found a stack of deadspace items that I really could have done with a month ago when I was fitting a dreadnought.

I'm going to play around some more tonight because there is more to the application than what so far seen. 

Huge Thanks

Best of all, and this is where MoxNix gets a HUGE thank you, I found a new way of tracking my Sell Orders and based on what I now can see I think I'm going to be a lot better at managing my Expired, Completed and Outstanding market orders.

I knew Merchant Monarchy was a great blog, I just never knew MoxNix was the name behind it and, mate, this is for you:

Running a Marketplace

In Curse I try to run a "marketplace" in one of the systems I frequent, I typically manufacture items in station but also import materials and some items that I cannot make or would be too expensive to manufacture.

Competition

It's not as bad as Jita but there is a thriving market and looking at what is available its a good market. T1 ships and modules are plentiful, local rats provide a lot of these modules and so prices are low but there is also a good supply of common T2 ships and items priced higher than Jita but not uncompetitive.

I know of at least three people in a nearby system who populate the market along with probably another 10 or so who post small numbers of items or things they have. In my system there are four people I regularly see, two of whom are in my Alliance and we try to keep prices similar and I certainly try to avoid stocking the same items they do.

As a result we have a well stocked market with good (for null sec) pricing. I've spoken to a couple of people who have travelled eight or nine jumps just to buy at our prices rather than someone closer. 

Deciding What To Sell

This is other major issue. the other being pricing, that any seller has. Deciding what to sell can take a lot of time and research to answer but it may not be the right answer next week or the week after.

I've received a lot of advice from friends but I've also found a lot of other blogs useful reading to understand the market and the HOW/WHAT to sell. MarketsForISK, MerchantMonarchy and the TCS series from Sugar Kyle.

I find I have to review what I have for sale and what price it is compared to the price in Jita as well as other sellers locally at least every 48 hours. It is a lot of work and I do wish I had a better tools to help me manage this I still do most of research of the work manually.

I have setup three Google Docs spreadsheets that uses EVE-Central to get pricing data for items and using these spreadsheets I can review and update orders in less than an hour. A CSV Export of Active Orders from EVE Mon twice a day (unfortunately I haven't automated this) allows me to track the current status of what I'm selling.

Having access at work and on tablet devices I can actually do quite a bit of the work when I'm not logged into EVE and then when I do login I can get straight to it.

The market is profitable but nothing like running operations in a major trade hub. I'm lucky to make 2 billion ISK a month from sales but what money I do make goes back in to stocking and running the market.

I guess that makes me technically a non-profit corporation.

Custom Orders

As well as the market I also run contracts to/from Jita for friends who also live in/around my Curse home. I have a simple rule, any contracts up to 350,000m3 and a small charge for fuel (this is either per m3 or a fixed rate). It works well and I rarely leave or return with my cargohold empty.

This adds extra income, not a huge amount but its a steady amount and helps offset fuel costs rather than contribute to the market directly.

New Items, New Opportunities

I started selling Combat Boosters on market when I saw there wasn't any of the ones I usually use, I invested a few hundred million into getting Blue Pill, Exile and Drop in Improved and Strong variants. 

So far sales have been slow for Exile and Drop but I've sold out of all but a couple of Strong Blue Pill. Prices are competitive but sales are just slow, hopefully with the return of people from the northern hemisphere summer I'll see an increase in sales.

One area I want to increase my profits in is the sale of ships especially pre-fit ships that are available for either Public or Alliance only contracts. I know a lot of T1 frigates and cruisers are used locally so I'll spend some time on zKillboard reviewing the kills around me and seeing what the most common T1 ship losses are and then I'll try to add contracts for those fit ships.

New Category View Wish

Tracking what I have is quite easy, the market Window shows my current active Sell Orders easily but I do miss things and I'm fortunate that EVE Mon tells me when market orders have expired. But I don't always check EVE Mon and sometimes I do miss things that I need to restock.

Sell Orders List - a list of completed would be really useful

What I'd like to see is something like the Buy/Sell Orders but for all expired orders over the past 7 days. I could check this tab and see the Sell Orders that completed in the past 7 days and from this I would easily be able to see what I needed to restock and re-list for sale.

Profit and Loss

So far I've not suffered a loss populating the store, I've had weeks where I've only made enough to cover costs but most weeks I'm running at least a profit. A 20% profit margin was my aim when I started and I'm doing well to get that most weeks but the market is a living entity and it doesn't always work to my advantage but rolling all my profits back into my market means that I'm always able to stock it.

Wares to Market

I've had a good collection of wares to take to market this week, I've been usually frugal in my stockpiling of Metamaterials so I had a nice stack of around 170,000 units each of Photonic and Terrahertz along with the loot from my missioning/officer spawn.

All up my cargo bay said it was worth around 7 billion worth of materials I'd be shipping and this is good timing as I'm only a week or so from needing more input materials for my towers.

Jumping Out

Shipping the materials out of Curse was simple enough, I have two cyno chains I can use and I fired up one and had the materials in high sec within 5 minutes of filling the Jump Freighter. 

I have two cyno chains because sometimes a mid/end-point system may have too many pilots in it for me to want to jump. This is especially so when I'm carrying such an ISK amount.

Moving to Jita

Next I unloaded everything in my local high sec station and setup courier contracts to another alt to take the stuff to Jita for sale. I do this as a precaution against ganking, by splitting up the wares and using courier contracts I'm hoping that the casual ganker will ignore me and I'll be able to pass unhindered. 

Of course this means multiple trips but a alt with a full mid-grade Nomad set and extra warp speed implants doesn't add much time to the journey.

For Sale

Once in Jita its time to sell and this is where patience really counts. I want to make the most from what I'm selling but I also don't want to sell, at first, to buy orders so I look at the price of what I'm selling and then lower the price by a small amount so as to give myself some "daylight" between my items and the next cheapest.

For Metamaterials this means lowing the price further so I will only change by, no more, than 3 ISK but in fact I only dropped the price by 0.75 ISK. Other items were put on at just under current lowest with the hope they'll sell fast.

I setup my sell orders just before downtime and when I logged in this morning I'd sold roughly half of what I had available, which was good, and I spent a little time redoing orders and changing prices as needed.

That's my days market work done, now its time to earn some more ISK via missions and ratting.

Metamaterial Prices Gone Wild

Disclaimer:

This is not meant as a serious analysis of the EVE Online Market but it is my view and conclusions that I have made with regard to how things are and may be in the future. Your opinion and conclusions may be different and as such no claim of accuracy is made by me.

As part of my daily dashboard I monitor the prices of the four different metamaterials and I've seen a sharp drop in the per unit price over the past three months.

This is especially interesting for me as I produce Terrahertz and Photonic Metamaterials and the drop has seen my profit margins drop from 2 billion to just over 1.1 billion per month in this time and if there is something an industrialist hates, it is losing money.

Market Conditions

Using the Market History Display (provided by Fuzzworks) it is easy to see and compare several market factors 

Nonlinear Metamaterials price since 1st June 2014

Plasmonic Metamaterials price since 1st June 2014

Terahertz Metamaterial price since 1st June 2014

Photonic Metamaterial price since 1st June 2014

Much like any market product there will always be volatility but I've been trying to work out why there has been this drop in price and whether or not to stay I should stay with these metamaterials or move to something else.

Volume is still very good, with over a million units per day being sold, usually a lot more, but it is Photonics have seen the most price drop (from around ~11,500 to ~9,000) even with a large volume being sold daily.

So far there has been no price rebound and the price continues to decrease

Supply and Demand

Supply and demand will impact any price, but if there is a large demand then we'd expect to see the price increase not decrease. Consequently should there be a large supply then we'd expect the price to drop and this is what we're seeing.

I checked the number of Orders and was surprised to see that there was far more Photonic Metamaterial for sale than any other metamaterial, nearly three times in some cases but usually at least double, and as a result there is a lot more market competition for people selling.

In fact checking the other metamaterials I see that they all have a lot more for sale than they have in previous weeks and that the demand is only slightly more than previous weeks. As a result this is most likely why we're seeing the price of each metamaterial dropping so much.

Over Supply or Market PvP

The market is showing that we have an over supply of Metamaterials and this is causing the price to drop, some more so than others, but is this going to continue or is it just a short term result of the Crius expansion being released?

Changes in the Crius expansion have increased the material requirements for T2 blueprints (copies/originals) and this has had the result of more metamaterials being needed per blueprint, so this will drive the demand up. 

However this cannot solely explain the continuous drop in price, I believe that people are Market PvP'ing these materials rather than selling to buy orders (which is logical as the difference between Buy and Sell for MM is usually between 800 and 900 per unit) and this is causing the price to drop continuously as people update their orders and lower their price to be below the "current lowest".

Conclusion

This 0.01 ISK dropping is at times followed by a significant price floor drop of between 1 and 10 ISK which just causes the price to get even lower. There has, a couple of times, been a "White Knight" of sorts who has reset the market buy buying all the low priced orders and reestablishing a higher price, but this person hasn't appeared in recent times and the price has continued to drop.

I'm still not convinced that I need to change anything at the moment, as always I am looking at other sources of income to supplement my reactions, but I still have a few weeks of inputs remaining and the price has not yet hit the level where I feel action is required.

Of course I'd like a higher price as this means more profit for me which means I can invest this ISK elsewhere, pay bills and buy shiny stuff to fly but I'm still making money. Just not as much as two/three months ago, that's market volatility for you.

Buying Combat Boosters

It is said timing is everything and that was certainly true on Tuesday night for me.

There I was ratting away in null sec to test out a new Gila fit (which far surpassed my expectations in how well it worked) when I had a conversation request from my friendly Combat Booster Dealer (I wanted to say Drug Dealer but technically they aren't drugs but boosters).

I've mentioned Saucemeister (and his corporation E's and Whizz) once before in my post, near the end, on Combat Boosters. I've used their services before to purchase Combat Boosters as it's a very cut throat and complicated industry to work in.

An Aside

A lot has been said in-game and by external gaming websites about how bad EVE Online players can be. It can be a horrible game to play when you're constantly taunted or pushed around by people who take pleasure in causing grief to others.

What isn't said is there are players who are good and honourable who try to actually forge and build relationships with other players. Saucemeister is one of these to me, he may be a different if faced as a PvP opponent, but in his guise as a seller of Combat Boosters he really excels with Customer Service and building of relationships and through him that's a positive appearance for his corporation as well.

Back To Topic

Saucemeister contacted me as a previous customer to see if I'd was in need of any new boosters as they had recently updated their prices and would have supplies soon available.

Timing is everything and could not have been more perfect as I'd just written a reminder to organised a purchase of Combat Boosters that morning. I only had a couple of the Strong Exile and Drop boosters left that I use. 

Also being in a new null sec home I could take the opportunity to buy a few Improved and Strong boosters for sale on the local market and see if that bought any interest.

Buying

I was linked the pricing spreadsheet (which I'll link here later if given permission) and I then worked out what I needed. Pricing was very reasonable, delivery is throughout New Eden but is extra although free delivery is available for large orders.

In the end I decided I'd stock the Improved and Strong variants of Blue Pill, Exile and Drop so I ordered

• 10 x Improved Blue Pill
• 10 x Improved Drop Booster
• 10 x Improved Exile Booster
• 10 x Strong Blue Pill
• 10 x Strong Drop Booster
• 10 x Strong Exile Booster

For a total cost of just under 800m ISK, delivery was included in this price, and all I had to do was setup a Buy Contract for the items and it would be filled in a few days.

The Buy Contract is needed because you cannot create item exchange contracts for Combat Boosters so you need to setup Buy ones which does allow you to specify Combat Boosters part of the deal. 

When accepted they'll get the ISK but you get the added security of knowing that you cannot be scammed because they need to provide the actual goods (Combat Boosters) you've specified in the "Get" section of the contract.

For All Your Booster Needs

This is the type of Customer Service that rarely you see in Real Life and is something of a rarity in EVE Online. The timing was perfect and it may well have been a few weeks before I got around to contacting E's and Whizz.

I cannot recommend E's and Whizz highly enough, if you need Combat Boosters buy them from these guys. They make it pain free with very competitive prices and fast service.

Know Your Scams: Rare Item For Sale

Setup

The 'Rare Item for Sale' scam utilises some of the cheaper officer/deadspace/faction items that can be found on the mrkate. The key to the scam is setting up the contract with one or two items plus other innocus items that make it appear that the price advertised is a really good deal.

Faction items in a contract, must be a good deal

Officer items especially can sell for several billion ISK and seeing one or two for sale in a contract for, what appears to be, the low price of a billion or two can be irresistible.

Once setup the scammer will start advertising in Local, usually something like:

[Multiple Items] Hanger Clearance
[Multiple Items] Corp Closing - Hanger Clearance!
[Multiple Items] Rare Items For Sale!

With the contract linked at the start and a description indicating a firesale or rare item is available.

What Happens Now

The mark comes along and sees, what appears to be an awesome deal for faction/officer or deadspace items that appear to be well under "perceived" market prices. They of course Accept it and find out after price checking that they aren't as valuable as they thought.

How Can You Protect Yourself

Spend a little time reading the details of the contract closely will help you. Verify that the green text shows you receiving what you're expecting. This type of contract implies a ship with rigs and fit, so verify not just that you can see the fit and rigs but also the ship is there.

If you see a contract make sure you block both the issuer AND the person who advertises the contract (they could be different).

Know Your Scams: Margin Trading

The period shortly before and after a new expansion is released typically sees an increase in scamming from people in the major trade hubs. Most are obvious scams, even for newer players who take the time to look at them, but some are not obvious and the most common example of this is the Margin Trading Scam.

Setup

The premise for the scam is quite simple, encourage someone to buy an overpriced item or items by providing bait in the form of a buy order for the same item(s) but at a significantly higher price than what they are being sold for.

An example would be:

I place for sale on the market three Tobias's Modified Torpedo Launcher at 650m ISK each and then I put a buy order up for three Tobias's Modified Torpedo Launcher with a buy price of 1b each but I set the quantity to 3.

Now the Seller goes around advertising in various channels that obviously the person who put the Buy Order up must have made a mistake (perhaps playing while drunk) and put an extra zero in their buy order. They wish they had the ISK to take advantage but perhaps someone else could and make some money on this.

What Happens Now

Eventually a a player, the mark, will see the advertising, investigate and very possibly try to profit by this "obvious mistake".

Off they go to the market and find three being sold for 650m, which they then buy and they try to sell back to your buy order but it fails because there is not enough ISK in the wallet of the character who placed the Buy Order. 

Result: The mark is now out 1.95b ISK, the 'failed' buy order is removed disappears and most importantly you're richer because you sold those pesky officer modules so quickly.

How Margin Trading Makes This Work

The key to this scam is the Margin Trading skill and the higher the level it is trained the more useful it.

Without the skill any buy orders that a character places will result in the ISK needed being removed immediately from the players wallet and places it in the "market escrow" account. When someone fulfills your buy order the money is transferred from the "market escrow" account to the other players account.

The Margin Trading skill allows you to lower the amount of ISK needed to place buy orders from 100% to 24% of the total value, of the order, when the skill is trained to V. 

For example with Margin Trading trained to Level I:

• When you put up a buy order for an 100 items at 10,000 ISK, the game removes 750,000 ISK (75% of the total) from your wallet, and puts that into the "market escrow" account. The remaining 25% remains in your wallet until the buy order is filled 
• The remaining 25% is not in the wallet of the seller when the order is filled it will be cancelled, the seller keeps the item and receives no ISK and the buyer receives their monies back but no item because the sale never occurred.

The higher Margin Trading is the less ISK you need to raise the buy order and so long as once the order is placed you keep the wallet of the character empty you have no risk to yourself and just need to advertise and get a mark.

Remove Margin Trading, Remove The Problem

No, this isn't a solution. Margin Trading actually is a skill any legitimate trader can make use of. The ability to not have to have the entire buy order value taken from your wallet means they can put what remains to good use and either raise more buy orders or cover others that will be filled. 

I use Margin Trading to help me get my monthly raw materials for my towers, placing buy orders for two or three billion ISK worth of materials but only having to provide a few hundred million ISK upfront really helps my liquidity. It's my own fault if the ISK isn't there and someone wants to fill my buy order, but combined with good Sell Orders and common sense (don't overextend) you don't.

How Can You Protect Yourself

You cannot stop these types of scam let alone any of the dozens that any trade hub regular sees in local, instead you need to be aware of what they are and how to find them.

Now you know what the Margin Trading Scam is you can, hopefully, better identify it and avoid becoming the mark

Wheelin' and Dealin'

It's been a nice week, long skill queues are nicely coming to a end and I've been able to buy, at very good prices, lots of faction modules to fit out ships to add that extra dps or resistance that they deserve.

I've also been spending too much time idling in Jita local, reading the messages from the people I haven't blocked for scamming. One thing I've noticed is a lot of people do not understand Margin Trading or many of the other scams that appear so I'm aiming to produce a few posts on these for educational purposes.

Buying and Making

I've spent nearly 4 billion ISK in the past week buying modules, salvage materials and T2 materials for a variety of purposes. Faction and deadspace modules will be used to replace lower meta/T2 modules on a few of my major ships where as the salvage materials will enable me to finally produce T2 variants of rigs I use without having to buy off the market.

The T2 materials I've purchased are for a small production run of the new T2 Venture variant, the Prospect, I managed to secure a 4 run -4/-2 BPC last week from a friend for the excellent price of nothing so I'm going to make them and keep two for myself and give two to friend who is helping to make them. It's a nice test to see if we can work together and more importantly develop some trust because there may be more we can do in the future, war withstanding...

Selling

It's been reasonably quiet, my Curse inventory is nicely selling for a mininum of 15% profit per item and I've been able to manufacture any new items myself without having to resort to trips to high sec.

My best news for the week was the Revelation dreadnought that I had spare in Mai finally sold after nearly two weeks on contract. I put up the T2 rigged Revelation that I had spare for 2.5billion ISKand received a counter offer rather quickly of 2.25b, I declined as I really wanted 2.35b mininum and so I left it and late last week a member of Nulli bought it from me.

I only hope they were successful extracting it from Mai :)

Freighter/Jump Freighter Changes

Kronos introduced the low slots to F and JF's and as such I've invested in a set of T2 Reinforced Bulkheads, Cargo Expanders and Nanofiber Internal Structure's to help my ships. 

The cargo expanders are fitted to the Jump Freighter and this gives me an extra 5000 m3 of space and trust me, this is used. When I jumpt o high sec I transfer the cargo to a freighter with either two bulkheads and a nanofiber or triple bulkheads (depending on the cargo carried). Of course I keep a full set of each nmodule in my cargohold so I can swap out as needed.

I have cut down on my trips personally but I have found myself doing a few more "urgent" trips for alliance people and so long as the fuel cost is covered I have no problem with this.

Wallet Restoration

Cashing Out

It was time to cash out, I had less than 42m ISK in the wallet division that my trader has access to and I had a whole raft of things I needed to buy or sell (sales/broker fees still have to paid when selling). I still have around 19billion in sell orders pending but they're not items that will sell quickly.

My missioning in both High Sec and Null Sec has been profitable with ISK and rewarded LP, so much so that I went to market with ten Slave Omegas and nine Snake Omegas. All were put on the market immediately and when I woke up this morning every single one had been sold at an average profit of 700m each (this takes into account the ISK to purchase and the cost of the implant needed to cash out).

Instead of looking at a 42m ISK wallet division I now have over 7 billion available and this doesn't include another months output from my reaction towers that will be going on the market this weekend and I expect will run me over the 12 billion mark.. 

Don't tell my CEO though as he'll want some ISK for the Alliance coffers...

What I'm Doing

Null Sec Local Market

 

My local market sales have slowed, I haven't seen any new people selling but I have seen a drop off in traffic which I put down to the new people in the area. I will have to relist items in a couple of weeks (I sell on 60 days cycles not the default 30 or 90 day ones) and I will check all prices to make sure I'm competitive but elsewhere income is good so I'm not really concerned with this dip in sales.

 

Capital Production

 

I've decided to pull the plug on my Capital Production line and as a result have a nice stack of researched BPO's ready for resale but also a large stock of minerals that I can use for other things or sell.

 

Why have I done this, two reasons:

 

1. Effort
2. Profit

 

My profit margin for Capital ship production has dropped over the past few months. A lot of people are producing capital ships and unfortunately this has dropped the price to the point where the effort to make capital ships hasn't been worth it. I'm sure others can disagree but for me it is time to get out.

 

I'll be listing and selling my capital part BPO's (22 of them) over the next couple of weeks and I think I'll easily get between 25 and 30 billion ISK for them. The actual ship BPO's (12 of them) I'll keep and will add some PE and ME to them before putting on copying duty and selling the copies on the market (for a passive income of at least 2 billion ISK)

 

Missions

 

I'm stilling missioning although not for Thukker Tribe at the moment I've moved on to Caldari Navy to see if I can get my Trading Alt's standings up and in turn lower his broker fees from 0.75% to (lowest possible) 0.185%. I've been told this can be done but so far no change but I will be missioning all this week to get my standings up so I can use Level 4 agents instead of the frustrating Level 1 and 2's I am able to use now.

 

One alt is now maximising his missioning skills with all social skills to V within 60 days. If this works out then I may have to update all my other characters that will participate in PvE.

 

Blog

 

I'm enjoying this blog, I do wish I had more to write about and I do have lots of ideas but I'd like to throw the floor open. If you have any ideas for posts you'd like to see please leave me a comment and I'll see what I can do.

Looking for a HERO

Actually I'm not, personally I'd like them to be further away but so far I'm only having to deal with a single cloaky AFK camper and a couple of TEST pilots who are trying to siphon my reactions.

 

Could be a lot worse but I'm not focusing on the negative I'm quite the opposite and happy at the moment as I got word of the HERO deployment system about 24 hours before it was public knowledge and managed to get three full JF's of modules and other stuff into station (which is not a friendly one for jump capable ships)

 

Frenzy

 

I've now sold out of modules in less than four days and am around 2 billion ISK better off. I put most items for sale in the 10% to 30% over Jita profit category but a lot of T1 modules I put at local prices which put most under Jita but having over three hundred Experimental Micro Warp Drive I's meant I was making money even with a very low resale cost.

 

Sounds odd but my tracking spreadsheet shows me making an overall profit of 9% on this one item and an average profit (over all items I sold) of 17%.

 

Not Again

 

Unfortunately I won't be restocking as competition is no doubt going to be fierce and I've already been reading that profits have dropped and profiteers are taking over. Well that's not the only reason, the other reason is I don't want to lose a JF in such a heavily populated system where everyone wants to shoot the next ship that appears.

On the way to Profit

Moved

 

Well I've moved into my new null sec home, previously I'd just visited but now I live here. Bookmarks have been created around gates and the docking range of the systems only station has been well and truly plotted (it's not a bad station, better than those I use in low sec).

 

I have a few deep space safes that I was able to get off friends who have been in system longer and a couple are off d-scan to all celestials.

 

Local Politics

 

It's been interesting watching Alliance and local intel channels and getting a feel for the politics around the constellation. Former neutral/reds are now light blue but don't have access to our intel channels but we have access to another shared channel with them and we fleet with them a lot for defence or localised roams.

 

I've gotten to recognise quite a few by name and no longer flee when I see them enter system, of course I don't fully trust them yet but that will change as I join their fleets.

 

Towers

 

Towers are going nicely, although the "over 1000 ISK" drop in the price of Metamaterials over the past week has not been good. It's cut into my margins rather sharply but to counter this I've added two new towers producing Sylramic Fibres, I could have gone back to Fullerides but I've found the market to be more populated and harder to sell into than Sylramic Fibres.

 

Market

 

I've started to populate the local market with a lot of modules and ships, there is competition within station but also from one jump away on a lot of items but aggressive pricing (under cutting by 5%/10%) should see me win business. I've put 1.5billion ISK's worth of modules on the market to see how they go, most are in quantities around 8 to 10 but a few items I know are in demand I've put on in quantities between 20 and 50.

 

Buy orders aren't good, I've not had a single one filled as of yet and this seems to be the way as most modules have zero buy orders.

 

Implants

 

I've finally finished my PvE grind in Minmatar space and I cashed in getting six Omega's and two full sets implants of the Low-Grade Nomad implants. These provide a boost to agility so Freighter and Supercarrier pilots do like them. Provisionally profit looks good, the Omega's alone should be nearly 5 billion ISK in profit, add in the full sets and I'm conservatively estimate I'll walk away with 7 billion ISK profit.

 

This is a nice boost to the wallet and will mean my towers can be fuelled and have all materials needed for the next two months from these monies alone.

 

Nearby in Curse is a Level 4 Mining agent that I'll be investigating once my standings for them are fixed.  Apparently a single low standing Gas Mining mission will result in over 7000 LP which can be used to purchase some very nice blueprints in the LP Store. 7000 LP is more than I got in high sec on a fully skilled character and instead of spending 45 minutes per mission its only a fraction of that.

 

Momentum

Status

 

The past few days have been productive, wares sold in Jita fattening the wallet and then some of the money spent on fuel and inputs. I even got permission to defer tower taxes for a month to purchased a new Jump Freighter to help out with logistics, still debating whether to go for a Nomad (fuel is more easily available where it will be used) or an Ark (which I'm already fully skilled for).

 

Training

 

The PI character in null sec finished Electronics Upgrades V and as I type this Cynosural Theory III will have completed and Command Centre Upgrades V is in the queue. When that finishes I'll make sure Cyno Theory V is added and he'll run out this before I switch the queue back to my 'main' on this account.

 

My new Jump Freighter character is finishing Armour skills but will be changing to Jump Fuel Conservation V in a week, based on research in a previous post, it makes financial sense to get this skill complete as the savings in fuel usage will add up over time considering he'll be making at least two JF runs per week.

 

Industry

 

I'm not quite as blueprint copy rich as Lorna but I've managed to collect nearly two thousand blueprint copies of various modules and ships. I'm currently in the process of tracking my mineral and component needs in order to use these up, not going to be cheap but fortunately the profit margin looks to be between 30 and 40% so it's a worthy investment.

 

I'm both disappointed and happy to see that the price of Faction Battleships has dropped, disappointed because I have four nightmare BPC's and two of those I've had for nearly seven months and cost me more than the ship now sells for but it's good because I'm able to market trade them quite well. Seven over the past week I've made at least 30m on each one.

 

My favourite current item are Hammerhead I drones, I had a few BPC's that allowed me to make 20,000 of them and they sold like hot cakes  within hours of being posted at around the 25,000 ISK each price point in Jita. I have a couple more BPC's left to use and I've invested in BPO that I'll research so I can continue to make them as they, for their mineral need, are a good source of reasonably passive income.

 

Towers

 

My towers are running nicely, fuel and input is added and the outputs exported to High sec ready for sale on a fortnightly cycle. It just works.

 

I'm going to add two more towers making Sylramic Fibres to diversify somewhat, I used to make these in Providence and they were a good choice but I'm not going to both with Fullerides anymore as the margin is small and the market saturated with sellers.

 

Mentoring

 

I've had someone in my new Alliance ask me about setting up towers and I will be working with this person to teach them how to do basic reactions and getting them up to speed with running towers and researching.

 

I've discovered that I know a lot about running towers but I need to find a way to communicate this to someone who is in a different time zone that doesn't really overlap with mine. This limits communication to EVE mails and chat messages rather than voice comms. Going to be interesting to see what we can do.

 

I am looking forward to the challenge though.

When Ego's Explode

Into the fire...

I mentioned previously about some friends disagreeing but it was nothing that time and common sense wouldn't solve.

Unfortunately I was wrong and over the last few days I've seen relations collapse totally and friends declaring they are no longer friends. It's all disappointing from my point of view, I can't say who is right and who is wrong because it's not that simple. I'm stuck in the worst place, in the middle having to watch my words and actions in case someone takes something the wrong way.

... into a Profitable circumstance

Still out of this mess has come a profitable situation. I was asked by one party to help them move assets back to high sec space from Curse via my JF services. Not a problem, I'm always happy to help.

The contacts came over and I accepted them, I'm inquisitive and I looked at what was in the contracts as there was one of about 3000m3, another of 82,000m3 and the final one was a whopping 300,000m3. Turns out it was a large mix of modules, loot and repackaged ships and so I immediately realised that what was here was exactly what I usually imported for my market activities.

So I made an offer to my friend, "sell me all your contract stuff, name a price". Which he replied with "you work out and tell me" [sic]. So I broke the contracts and started working prices out. Now I'm a sucker (and I know it) when my friends are involved and made an offer very close to Jita price.

In fact I think I was only 4% off the total price he could have gotten in Jita and I transferred the ISK to him and started sorting and listing items in Curse for sale. Now being away from a trading hub I do have to be a little careful with my prices, a lot of other people sell stuff within three or four jumps of me, but I was able to make at least 10% on items I listed with ships and other speciality modules going for between 50% and 70% over Jita.

I am so glad I trained a Trading alt and had him JC to Curse. 315 slots and I used 296 listing all the stuff I just got, combined with my booster shop in another region he has utilised all his slots for nearly 4 billion in sell orders.

Greed. Is. Good.

I do feel a little guilt in profiting from my friends situation but he has, a few times, told me that greed is good. I just hope he continues playing EVE, I'll miss him if he does leave, when the time comes I will be there first to ask "Can I Haz Your Stuffs?"

To market I go

It's been an expensive couple of months, excluding the Paladin loss, I've spent the majority of my income on paying back outstanding loans and buying large quantities of input materials and fuel for my towers.

 

My day-to-day balance went from just over 10 billion to 800 million in a few days, it wasn't a great morale boost seeing that but I did know that I had a couple of billion in materials to sell on hand with about another 5/6 billion available before materials ran out.

 

Well I was wrong about that, turns out I dropped nearly 9 billion of items for sale in Jita yesterday and I have only few outgoings for the next 4 weeks so I should nicely hit 15 billion before I have to buy inputs/fuel again.

 

It was once more fun to pass through known ganking systems in Domain and either see no gankers or dozens of CONCORD ships showing that they were there earlier in the day. My time zone is pretty quiet but you never know so I always make sure I never take more than a few hundred million ISK through these systems. I've used Red Frog many times but it's faster with my hauler these days thanks to the Nomad's he has.

 

I may not be making 'billions a day' as some blogs I read do but I make enough to cover my bills and build a nice excess that I funnel into long term storage or loan to 'a few' trusted people as an investment.

 

I don't spend a lot of ISK on PvP so that's a nice saving but when I do it's a few hundred million here or there so it really doesn't impact my bottom line. My only serious expense, which will be covered in a future blog post, is the supercarrier that I purchased and have been fitting out for the past four months.

 

So it's been a good, albeit quiet, weekend. How was your weekend?

 

Alliance Marketplace continued

NOTE: I've previously covered the idea, albeit briefly, for an Alliance Marketplace here.

 

I was idling in game last night on a secondary industry toon who happens to live in a null sec alliance. Alliance chat is sometimes interesting, mostly just people saying "hi" or asking, for me, uninteresting questions, occasionally they'll be something funny. Blink Off is the default for this channel, but last night I witnessed a conversation that once more got me thinking about an Alliance Marketplace.

 

However, like the real universe, there must be black/grey/special markets operating outside of the established marketplace. Yet at this time we cannot see them and there are markets like this that operate via mailing lists and contracts what I think we really need is an Alliance Only market that any alliance can operate and buy/sell to only their members.

 

Current Market

 

As it stands we have the market, it is public and as a result open to all. You can, subject to skills trained, buy/sell anywhere up to the distance of your current region. Anything you see on the market can be bought and you can sell anything that the market supports. You cannot prevent anyone buying or selling and taxes taken go into a sink.

 

Access to the marketplace is based on the region you are in and you can use a selector to limit what you see by region, system or station. You cannot see outside of the region you are in and there are additional filters that allow you to hide orders in the different classified space (high sec/low sec/null sec).

 

This makes sense in High Sec space, after all there must be an agency that maintains the beacons that transfer the data and makes sure they are all up to date. But head into Low Sec or Null Sec space and the further you go the more unbelievable it is. Of course localised markets make sense but the way they are now, just uniform and public isn't right and doesn't encourage null sec growth to what it could be.

 

Alliance Market

 

I see an Alliance Market operating exactly the same in terms of functionality and UI as the current market. Items in the normal market would appear in an alliance market, the buying/selling actions are the same the only things that would differ would be the following:

• Visibility

The Alliance Market would be visible and usable only by members of an Alliance. Like the current market it has limitations on visibility/buying/selling of items based on skills the only difference would be that people outside of the alliance would not know it exists. Item's listed only for alliance sale would never appear to an outsider.

 

The functionality within the UI for this would be 99% of current market, the only new functionality would be the filtering of results based on whether they are alliance only or not and any UI highlighting (exactly like the 'highlight own orders' that exists)

• Taxation

This is the only really new functionality and would allow the alliance to tax transactions much like the current market does only this would be 'in-addition' to any taxes normally paid. It should be up to the alliance how much is paid but a good starting amount would be 0.5% with an maximum limit of 5% per transaction.

 

Conclusion

 

The introduction of an Alliance Marketplace could have a significant impact on null sec alliances and their ability to maintain income but more importantly establish themselves not just in low sec but also null sec. New private trade hubs could be create and maintained without the concern of providing materiel to enemies who can buy and sell anywhere within their skill range.

 

I believe the Alliance Marketplace could be a significant step towards revitalising an area of EVE that is both clunky and oversaturated with players.