The trader experiment

From time to time, I read the Markets for ISK blog (http://marketsforisk.blogspot.ca/), and I must say I'm quite impressed by that player. If you have some interest in understanding the market perspective in Eve Online, you should spend some time reading his blog.
I'm pretty sure that his (or her) day job is related to the economy industry (banking, trading, or something like that).

As I was daydreaming in the subway last week, I decided to make a small experiment for a couple of months, just to see if I could make it works.

I will use an alt as a trader in a low volume tradehub (Dodixie), with a limited budget (25 millions of ISK), no access to my corporation assets, and 2 ships: a Heron from a career agent (400m3 cargo haul) and a Wreath (fast align T1 hauler, 4000m3 hauler).
My ultimate goals are the following:
+ to generate, at least, a 20% gain per month in wealth in the first few months (as I doubt to be able to keep such a growth rate at some point)
+ To have as little as possible of ISK in my wallet (1% to 2% of my wealth)
+ less than 1h/day, to adjust Sell Orders and buy new items.
+ PLEX that account.

For that last goal, I'm supposed to do it with my industry activities, but I kept re-investing in new BPOs each months, and thus, failed to do it since, at least, a year.

I don't exclude the possibility to trade items from my corporation to that alt. On that case, since I don't build an item if I can't have a 10% GPM selling it in Jita, I will sell them to my alt with a 10% profit for my corp (TCO cost of that item + 10%).

So, I spent the next few days training that alt a few skills (an other 10m ISK worth of skill books, that I don't count in the initial budget of 25m that I gave to the alt.)
As I was scheduled to be out of town for a few days, I did schedule a one week skill queue, that is about to finish this Thursday, and burnt my 25m ISK of initial budget in Thursday 26th of august.

Since I had some time to spare that day, I decided to run some level 1 distribution missions with my heron, to raise some further cash while waiting for Sell order to sell.
I finished buying a venture+fits and buying some weapons for my heron to finish some quests.. bah, to bad for my profits :-)

Anyway, I generated around 1.5m ISK with those missions.
Using my main character in The Forge, I found a couple of items that I could buy for cheap in Jita, and re-sell them immediately in Dodixie for a profit. In a few hours, my 1.5m ISK were now a 4m ISK, then a 6m ISK, that I did re-invested in various items before leaving for the week end.

As of today, Wednesday 31th of august, here's the picture:

This month          
Bought for:    275 291 436,88      
Sold for:    318 546 238,52      
Taxes paid:          
Gain    43 254 801,64      
Account    2 883 602,36   
I did traded some items on Monday and Tuesday, and realized that I forgot to buy and train the Minmatar industrial skill, when I tried to move a 4000 m3 cargo. Most of those trades were quick one, buying for 20m-30m in Jita and sell "immediate" in Dodixie with a 600 000 ISK - 1m profit per trip.

Those profits were reinvested in new items, that are now in sales.

In the meantime, I did spent some time, while moving stuff around, at programming some scripts and database for my trader, to track her
activities. I've not finished yet, but most of it is done.
I still have to handle taxes, to deduce them from gains, and account my sell orders in my wealth calculation.
IIRC, I have 120m of Sell Orders as this Wednesday morning.

I must say that it's not that bad to go from a 25m budget to close to 40m in just a few days. I don't count my sell orders for now, since I didn't integrated them in my excel file yet.

To help me to decide if I will do a profit on some particular item, I did a quick calculator in excel. It helped me to determine if some items were worth it to move between trade hubs.


Broker Fee    2,70%    Sales taxes    1,20%          
Quick Calc                               taxes:           gain:             GPM      
amount:          2                  
Buy at:           1 249 998,00                  
Sell at:           1 800 000,00    -70 199,00    959 606,00    44,00      
Immediate:    1 705 007,07    -20 459,08    869 099,97    36,40   

I will make a post once a month to report on my progress in this experiment.

On my industry buisness:

For my other activities, well, it seems that I did a "slight" miscalculation :-) I just completely forgot to by some mexallon earlier past week, and ended up with close to 10B of minerals, but barely no mexallon at all.

Minerals    typeid    quantity      
Tritanium    34    214 362 418      
Pyerite        35      75 999 780      
Mexallon    36        3 252 496      
Isogen         37      49 141 255      
Nocxium    38        2 544 550      
Zydrine      39        1 199 964      
Megacyte   40          404 327      
Morphite    11399    26 551      
    worth value:    9 590 419 892,21   

I don't want to buy too much of mexallon at a time, its price is still dropping ever few days. And I think that I have an other 50m, or so, units of pyerite in transit to my production system.


Oh, and for those who may wonder how to keep up your production with your minerals, I've come up with a formula which seems to work for me. Since Tritanium is the mineral the most used across the board for T1 items, I base my calculation on its amount:


Minerals    quantity    Cur. ratio    ideal ratio    needed      
Tritanium    214 362 418    100,00    100,00    0      
Pyerite          75 999 780    35,45        30,00    0      
Mexallon        3 252 496      1,52        10,00    18 183 746      
Isogen          49 141 255    22,92          3,00    0      
Nocxium        2 544 550      1,19          0,60    0      
Zydrine          1 199 964       0,56         0,22    0      
Megacyte          404 327       0,19         0,08    0      
Morphite             26 551       0,01         0,00    0   

So, depending on my amount of Tritanium, I need 30% of that amount in Pyrite, 10% in Mexallon, etc. Those numbers seems to hold for me, and are based on producing ships (which are the most mineral intensive products). I may need to revisit those numbers if I start building Citadel related items.