Saturday, November 14, 2015

The annual scrape

“What have I been up to lately that will interest my dear readers?”, I asked myself, confidently upgrading to plural in a mad fit of optimism.

I have been market trading, an activity which coincides nicely with dodgy hotel internet connections. Sigh. I'm fed up with travelling, especially when such travelling involves an “Experienced Leader” course consisting almost entirely of being told by a gaggle of organisational psychologists exactly why you are so rubbish at, well, leadership.

Anyway, I decided to stock a few (hundred) of the more obviously missing items from the local market in my new alliance headquarters. I have station traded before, mostly in Jita and lowsec. An active nullsec alliance is pretty good in comparison to lowsec, roughly equivalent to Jita trading in terms of total profit on my relatively meagre total investment. Well, at least for someone who is fundamentally opposed to 0.01 ISK games - I tend to update about once a fortnight.

I set up a bunch of reasonable buy orders in Jita for a bunch of T2 mods and ammo. It was awfully expensive, even with Margin Trading V, because I really dislike changing orders and therefore prefer to set them up for at least 100m each. I then let them fill in their own time before carting the whole lot to their destination via a jump freighter straight out of Jita. Those are some expensive jump freighter loads!

At the other end, of course, I take the equally lazy step of ensuring that I always have a minimum number of each item sitting in the station. This means I can restock without having to visit Jita. It also means that I have a lot of ISK, about 60b, tied up in assets: a few dozen for sale, a few dozen in the nullsec station inventory, a few dozen in Jita. However, since these are all commonly used items which are easily turned over I am not overly concerned.

What I WAS concerned about, though, was running out of ISK. I may have gone a bit mad with the buy orders. They seem to be filling faster than I am used to, even at my relatively low bid price. So I decided it was time to give the hangars their annual scrape. I fired up jeve assets and had a poke about:

107,821,123 items (yes, there is a lot of ammo there)
1,266 average ISK value
54,708,484,070 reprocess value
136,525,483,768 total market value

I was surprised by a few things including a Nestor (I have no idea where it came from), a few Thanatos carriers (I traded them for a while), a couple of fit Protei in Amarr (that I had forgotten about), and an Obelisk that I never use any more. I put this lot up for sale and liquidated a bunch of now profitable speculation items.

The ISK crisis passed after a few days of increased sales and I settled down to watch the progress. My low effort methods result in turnover averaging about 1.5b/day. A minimum profit margin of 25% (hey, it’s risky!) equals a few billion each week. Good enough.

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