Monday, February 9, 2015

Trading update: sucking up the losses

Marmite war declaration turned out to be a perfect time for me to visit my wormhole system. I scouted closest highsec connection and went on my way. Before leaving, I have contracted some of the loot to my traders. I had around a billion of loot piled up from ninja salvaging activities. Not bad, that will cover my pos fuel for at least few months.

Trading is boring


Once I'm back home, I log in my trading alts. It's been awhile since my last logon, which was, I believe, around two weeks ago. That's not too long ago, considering that I used to login once a month. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to matter. I take a look at my inventory and I see 65 billion in stock.


God damn it. That usually is a terrible sign. What it normally means is that prices have tanked and I got bunch of loot that I will have to sell it at the loss or keep it long enough for another price fluctuation to happen. I don't have patience to wait long time and I also don't like to have my capital tied up. Not to mention that is only on Jita alt. I got 4 more accounts around the universe and each of them having half as much stock.

I start putting my stuff for sale. Some prices of bigger items like High-grade Slave Epsilon or Core A-Type Large Armor Repairer really tanked. Even though I am quite careful and set multiple buy orders at different price ranges, I ended up with a lot of overpriced stock in just 2 weeks. This is really annoying.


I am all too familiar with this situation. As I wrote before, it's quite hard to do proper semi-afk trading. Swings like this kill your profit. So you either wait it out, which then turns out long term investment or sell at a loss and start over again.

Since I have hundreds of items, I seem to balance out my losses with other profitable deals and still turn out to be ahead. But having in mind my turnover, profit is meager. I need to change my strategy. Sitting with 350billion and only paying for my subs is not a good return of investment. Problem is I am too lazy. I got comfortable to updating my list that I handpicked during long period. I do not feel like sinking in time of finding other opportunities. I feel like I'm in stagnation.

Future plans


Nevertheless, I have taken first steps into shaping my strategy. I am finishing training skills on more trading chars that will be used for more focused tradings, based on material groups. Meaning, some will trade in deadspace mods, some will trade in implants and some will take into high volume goods. Such diversification hopefully will allow me to be better organized and help prioritize time on chars that bring in most profit.

I am still not sure if I should diversify by groups or should I diversify by price/volume. Perhaps try to do research on most profitable items, but that always changes. And time spent for analysis is better time spent updating orders. I have in mind to learn some python programming to help me process some of the data, but that is in the long term goal.

First things first, I need to grind up some standings. Most straight road is to grind some missions and do all COSMOS. Even a though of running missions makes me want to throw up, it's still good change of pace. Plus you earn some isk on the side. Who knows, maybe I will encounter a ninja. But that is all talk. As someone who is living in wormhole, means I will have to yet again abandon my corp activities for some highsec carebearing. I've been lately so busy with real life, that any thought of doing something in EVE worthwhile looks like a massive time sink that really demotivates me to undock and so instead I just spin my ship.

7 comments :

  1. Sounds like you're following pretty much the same path I did. I'm at the point now where I'm boiling things down to fewer items, longer term, lower margins, and higher volume. Fees are very important then.

    Another good thing about high volume items is even if you might have to sit on stock more often, it usually doesn't take as long for prices to cycle between high and low. So though you sit on stock more frequently, it isn't often you have to sit on it for a very long time. A week or two is often about all it takes. Of course that does mean you need enough to capital to do that without running short and having to stop buying for a while.

    For faction standings if you don't mind spending some ISK on tags, data center missions are the quickest, easiest way to bump them up. Cosmos missions are potentially even more faction but take much longer and require either doing non-trivial combat missions or buying drops from contracts.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The real MoxNix knows what he's talking about :)

      I must agree about the faction standings, saved me a fortune since I got higher standings for my trading alts.

      Delete
    2. It's been awhile since I did faction standing grind, but aren't datacenter missions one time COSMOS? I mean, I have done them, but they don't give as much bump as I want. Only ways to grind it up is to get story line by gridning lvl4s or COSMOS.

      Delete
    3. Technically yes, but that's sort of like saying "But isn't chocolate candy?".

      Sure, but just because I like chocolate that doesn't mean I like all candy.

      Delete
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    :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. When you say the rest of the details, you mean all the details. How about revealing 30% of details for free? Your promotion is misleading and I will have no choice but to report to Space Financial Conduct Authority. However I am willing to settle for getting one time free access to your investment details.

      Delete
  3. I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

    ReplyDelete