Tuesday financial report

It definitely pays off to do a little market research, and see what items can be re-sold for a decent profit. Since the last financial update I earned roughly 200mil isk just by doing proper market research. I moved a few items from Jita to rens, and currently my wallet looks as following:

1. Sell orders: 693,903,221
2. Freeflow isk: 105,721,661.27

Looks like my rudimentary trading plan works.

So far I made no links ok the quickbar, or opened Excel even once to keep track of anything I buy or sell (not saying that this is the way to do it, but just reminding myself that with proper book keeping I could have probably made more than 200mil that I made)

For now I don't want to share what I trade in case someone actually reads this, but I will give a full and detailed financial report on October 15th including every single item I traded, and price update strategies.

First month recap

After a rather long hiatus, I came back to EVE Online about a month ago. I was away for the best part of two and a half years, and before the big hiatus my main occupation was nul sec carebearing, ratting, and ocasional pvp with my stealth bomber pilot alt.

Different things happened, the corp I was part of fell apart, I moved back to high sec, and decided to strike out on my own. I trained up a few corporation management skills, created a corp of my own, and started doing PI on a massive scale with 15 characters; and that was the biggest mistake I ever made in my EVE Online career. The whole process was too tedious for my taste, I had to invest at least 3 hours each day to haul the items around, and after about a month I just gave up on it, and on the game itself.

To cut the long story short, I was away for a while, and now i'm back, determined not to make the same mistakes I made in the past.

So, from my 'vast' experience here is the list of things not to do:

• Don't go to nul sec when you have only 12mil skill points (you will in fact be someone's cannon fodder)
• Don't do PI on a massive scale. (it's too boring for a paltry one PLEX a month)
• Don't be a sheep (stop reading other people's blogs and blindly following their tactics)
• Don't fall for scams (in all honesty I only fell for one scam, margin trading one, for less than 100mil isk so no real harm done)
• Don't spend too much time on the game. Real life is interesting as well
• Don't fall into trap of doing one single thing all the time. It gets boring real easy

And of course if there is a don't list, there has to be a do list as well:

• Make realistic goals for each month, week and even a day
• Be an honest trader. 
• Be nice to people. If a hauler brings your stuff from Jita to Rens (25-odd jumps) for a rather low fee, be nice and say thanks. You will both feel nicer for it.
• Make fun of scammers in local chat while revealing their scams (helping a newbie is always nice)

And now for the actual recap of the first month:

 It all started very slow. I forgot the passwords I used for all of my accounts, and one of the accounts was tied to an e-mail address that was no longer available. I opened a support ticket with ECS using what limited information I had about my accounts and characters, and within a few days they got back to me, and gave me back all the info I needed to reactive all accounts. 

I also had 5 free days on each account from the last promo, and this gave me a chance to log on to each account, and start consolidating all the assets I had, and start thinking about what I want to do this time around.

I sold off most of the junk that was sitting in my hangar (on all of my characters) and started making an inventory of assets that might be useful in the future, and this is what came out:

1. Raviy Oyla 

• Bestower
• bunch of PI goo that needs to be sold off
• leftovers from old trading sessions
• Roughly 100 mil isk in cash

2. old PvP alt:

• fitted stealth bomber
• roughly 4mil isk in cash

3. Mission runner alt:

• Dominix with a lousy fit
• salvaging Catalyst
• bunch of salvage and modules to be sold off
• roughly 75mil isk in cash, and around 100k LP with a Gallente corp

4. Null sec carebear alt: 

• bunch of assets in the old station in Fountain, pretty much inaccessible
• PVE fit Drake (rather useless after Drake's got nerfed)
• bunch of junk to be sold off, worth roughly 100mil isk
• roughly 200mil isk in cash

5. Industry alt

• High sec mining fitted Hulk
• High sec mining fitted Mackinaw
• Mammoth 
• bunch of junk to be sold off, worth roughly 200mil isk
• roughly 45mil isk in cash

After everything was sorted out i was left with the following

1. Raviy Oyla

• Bestower
• roughly 150mil isk in cash

2. Other chars

• stealth bomber
• Dominix
• Drake
• Hulk
• Mackinaw
• Mammoth
• roughly 800 mil isk in cash

First month activities:

Relocated everyone and everything from Gallente space (Dodixie area) to Minmatar space

Raviy Oyla settled in Hek, did some station trading, 150mil cash doubled up to rougly 300mil. Trading station changed from Hek to Rens

I started boosting my Minmatar standings, so I did all the rookie missions, and career agents for Gallente and Minmatar, and finished the Sisters of Eve epic arc. Minmatar standings after connections V: 5.04 (that was boring and repetitive, but I did need the standings boost. Standings with Minmatar before the grind were at around -0.2.

Exploring market opportunities in Rens. The hub seems to be well stocked, and the current standings with Brutor tribe give me broker fee of around .44% (which is not bad considering the minimal investment)

Other char activities: 

Purchased Noctis for the Nul carebear alt, mission running in duet with the mission runner

Purchased a tanked Retriever for the industry alt (not that I ever went mining, but considering the latest changes to high sec mining, I won't be undocking the Hulk any time soon. 

All of the chars seem to have learned rather random and useless skills, so I started sorting that out, and upgraded all chars to a full set of +3 implants (yeah, i'm a cheap bastard).

I will finish off this post with an interesting anecdote from the last weekend. Being a sheep that I am, I followed the advice of another trading blogger to trade skill books. Buy them cheap from NPC vendors, and re-sell them for profit in a trading hub. I took a trip to a local college, stocked up on about 150mil worth of skill books, took them back to Rens, and posted them all on the market. Since I don't like playing the .01 isk game, I started undercutting aggressively, by 1000 isk at a time. About an hour into the game (I was triple boxing with my mission runner and salvager) I get this nice e-mail from a fellow trader saying that I suck (as if I didn't know that) and that i'm running the skill book trade for everyone with my aggressive undercutting. Being the nice trader I am, the reply was along the lines of: I won't play your .01 isk game, and if you don't like my trading method, you are more than welcome to trade in alternate commodities, or go to a different trading hub (Jita, the capital of .01 undercutting for instance). As a reply I got a nice and shiny bounty on my head: 10mil isk (Yaay me!)

The whole cheap skill book trading was rounded up with rougly 50mil isk in net profit, and I re-listed all the remaining skill books for the same price i bought them for. Interestingly enough, all were bought out by the same (let's not call it bot trader) person who complained in the first place :)

Yet another EVE online trading blog

Let me begin with a question: Is there a need for yet another EVE Online trading blog?

There probably isn't, but this can be a very nice platform to track my own progress, and keep myself in check with all the trading activities.

The way I see it, main reason for trading in EVE is to make myself independent from paying real $$ for the game, and to finance other activities I might enjoy.

A little bit about my EVE online background. When it comes to the game, I'm not new to it, but I'm still one of the biggest newbies around. I've been around EVE since 2006, with large gaps in play time. My oldest char has somewhere around 12mil Skill Points (which probably makes it the oldest newbie char in the game) and my youngest char has around 13mil Skill Points (char created in 2010).

I came back to EVE Online recently (about a month ago), liquidated all the old assets I had, and decided to start a trading career with one of my old chars that has almost all of the trading skills maxed out. The char is of course Raviy Oyla (the friendly trash talker from Rens) and this blog will be used to chronicle my progress toward my first milestone: 100 billion net worth for that one char.

Status as of today:

1. Freeflow ISK: 415,595,293.67 ISK
2. Sell orders total: 209,927,530 ISK
3. ISK on other active characters: approximately 800 million (this cash will never be transferred to Raviy Oyla)

One month goal:

1. Freeflow ISK: 200,000,000.00
2. Sell orders total: 1,200,000,000

Skills goal: Train Tycoon V

That much for today :)