Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Tiericide ahoy!

Zappity hasn’t been particularly active recently. I have been busy and travelling and not getting much pew pew time. My recent efforts have focused on the market, which is much easier to do on the laptop. I have built what ISK I have up over 18 months or so of active trading and, whilst not very wealthy, I at least have enough ISK lying around to do whatever I like. This includes playing with the market.

So when it was announced, I decided to invest 20 b of my hard-earned on the module tiericide changes. Of that, I have already spent 23 b. This failure in elementary mathematics is due to the first two rounds going well enough that I decided to tip profit from those modules into the kitty for the remaining items. After all, we have barely scratched the surface of really interesting modules.

I had focused on 44 item types in the first two rounds and ended up with just over 250k items in total for those categories. These were purchased Zappity style, which means low effort and low time commitment. I flagged the tiericide items that I wanted to acquire in one of my trading database tables and set up a little script that let me know which of my buy orders was filled. Every week or so I would look it up and set the orders up again, averaging about 50 m for each so they didn’t run out too fast.

The 250k items from the first two rounds cost me 3.5 b and I sold them all for 9.4 b, again Zappity style. This means that I set (what I thought) was a reasonable sell order price and left it alone. The announcements for the module families came, the market reacted, and almost everything was sold long before the patches arrived. Could I have made more? Easily. The market history indicates that the people who bought out my orders after the announcements probably made the same profit again. But I am not greedy. And, um, effort.

So what’s the current status of the remaining items? I have 853k of them (seriously, how big is Jita anyway?) across 314 types which cost 17.1 b. Right now I could list them at the ask price for 14.9 b profit. But I don’t want to yet. Perhaps I should take some profit now and reinvest. But, again, effort.

What is really interesting about this process is that people have lots of time to figure it out. This is unusual. Rebalancing speculation is usually done over very short timeframes with the early movers reaping the largest rewards. By now, however, there must be hundreds of millions of items stockpiled in Jita. It may well turn out that profits declines as tiericide progresses with more and more investors trying to get a slice of the action.

So here’s me looking forward to the next round of module tiericide. It should be an interesting year.

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