So the lil’ broke merchant of death is back with a report on progress for the week! This post is actually early, as I have some real life stuff to attend to and really wanted to put something up even if it’s a couple of days early. I attempted to increase my isk per hour on job slots above what I did last week(sorta successfully), and I dabbled a bit in reactions. So let's see where we’re at!
Sales for This Week:
Itemized sales for the week
I increased my isk per item from ~886 to ~2379, mostly due to moving out of the relatively soft ammo market currently on stuff I have BPs for and into some higher value items. I also sold more in five days than I did in seven last week, at increased isk/hr per job run. Scaling upward paid off!
Investing in the Future
So the long term goal is to eventually build Anshars’ profitably, and I took my first small step towards that potential goal. I purchased a fully researched capital component BP for 74mill isk. This is my first researched bp purchase, so for all I know I got ripped off here, but it doesn’t feel like it. There’s decent trade volume on the finished product at market, and it can be produced profitably in Hisec so it can pay for itself over time. Whether or not I can feasibly put it all together to sell an Anshar profitably is another story. While the Anshar combine is profitable with researched blueprints, there’s more profit to be had in selling the components individually.
The Obelisk itself is the biggest money sink in the project. A 10/20 Obelisk BP is currently selling for 10 billion isk, and the production of this with researched BPs is slightly above breakeven in Null, unless you want to run off more than 10 at a time which sounds slightly nutty for one person to do. So I either need to do the research myself on this, which would take a very long time, buy BP copies, or fly a freighter through null to combine into the Anshar. We’ll see how this shakes out, but it’s looking grim on this goal as of right now.
The Riddle of Steel
800mm Steel Plates i were selling at 1.6m-1.8m isk, and there’s decent trade volume. Buy orders are set at 765k isk, which is ~10% above the hisec production cost with a 10/20 blueprint. Most of the trade volume is in buy orders, but people are buying these off the market for some strange reason(I’ve sold ~40 so far). I love punishing flippers, so I’ve been selling these at 1.1m, which has netted me 1.5m isk/hr on my job slot running these off. If I can crash this market(it’s currently ~1.4m), I can run the overflow into 800mm Steel plates ii. These would net me about 700k/hr if I need to, but more importantly here I can potentially crush some station traders hopes and dreams. If the market holds stable, then it's even better for me profitwise. Win/win in my opinion for such a small materials investment!
Cashing in on Gallente Guns
The blaster market is still going strong. Not only have light blasters maintained their value, the cost of production materials has actually gone down a bit so I’m making close to 650k/hr off of Ion/Neutron, and 575k/hr off of electron. But the real isk this week was in Heavy Blasters. Neutrons netted me 1.1m/hr, Ions 850k/hr, and Electrons roughly 800k/hr. Guns I could sell at non-Jita markets netted me even more profit than this so it was a good week here!
In Rust we Don't Trust…
It was a poor week for ship production. I saw hounds were profitable(about 700k/hr) but by the time I got them to market the price dropped significantly. I only sold at about half that profit value, and am sitting on ships that I’m going to hold until the value on these goes back up. The true loss here was the invention slots. I spent a lot of time inventing these, when I could have spent that time making more blaster BPs, so I lost a lot of potential profit here.
The Federation Navy ships were still good this week. Comets spiked back up to 1325isk/lp, and Brutix Navy’s held strong at roughly 1200isk/lp. Southpaw’s actually moving to Zarzakh this coming week to engage in some piracy, so I’ll be taking a break from these unless I decide to buy LP on the public market. I’m scoping out purchasing some Concord LP for next week as there's some juicy (potential) market profit here. I'll talk a bit more about this later.
Rigging the Market
I wanted to diversify my rig inventions, but Small Transverse bulkheads are just too darn good. The isk/hr went up from last week, and I’m trading these at 675k/hr currently. High invention skills on rigs really add to profit margins since the invention is on one item only, so it’s a much greater overall part of production costs which I’m cashing in on. I’ll hopefully have Nanite Engineering 5 by the end of the week, which will push the margins up slightly further!
Reacting to Reactions
So I got into reactions this week, and I’m pretty disappointed. Margins are low(10-15% on “good” items), and market volatility is high. The isk/hr is 5-600k per slot for me so far, with a very high potential to take a bath. Just in the past three days Dysporite has gone from trading at 51k to 41k(the product I started reacting), and the input materials are increasing as well. The real winners in this market are the moon miners(as they are in most transactions), flippers and drug manufacturers. A lot of people are getting slaughtered here profitwise. Some of these reactions sell for 10-20% below input materials, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of these finished reactions on the market! Insanity. I might get into this more heavily as my cash flow increases and I study the market a bit more, but for right now I’m only running two of my six job slots. It’ll probably net me a couple hundred million isk/week(?). I’ll take it.
Supply Chain Woes
Another week, another set of headaches regarding the industry process. Here's the lowdown currently.
The Invention Bottleneck: Normalized Profit Per Hour vs Isk Per Hour
Since I’m using one character for copying, invention, and production it’s been extremely difficult keeping the BP flow up to run production constantly. While I’m making good isk/hr on my production slots, there are times when I’m not able to run any T2 jobs because my inventions/copies lag behind. I earn 0 isk/hr if I’m not using those production slots, so I need a better method for scheduling my very precious science slots. If that means dropping my isk/hr on production to “normalize” the outflow of goods, it’ll be a net benefit to me as a whole, even if that means I make slightly less profit per week. The best answer I have to this is currently LP trading for BPs to fill gaps, but the process is time consuming and tedious having to deal with people in this market. The BP contract market is even worse in this regard; there’s very little profit to be had as people try to maximize their gains on the BPs, and do so by selling to people just looking to break even(or lose money) making stuff for themselves. No doubt there’s profit to be had here, I just need to spend a little more time searching these markets for deals. More spreadsheets…
Cash is King, and I’m Broke
I need more isk! I’m trying to do this whole project through manufacturing, but it’s going to be a very slow process this way since I started with so little cash. It’s so tempting to use Southpaw to pad the wallet, but I really don’t want to do that(I even “buy” the LP off of him through contract). I’ve made isk, but using it to scale into larger items is expensive. Just the isk invested in assets moving from light to Heavy blasters is fairly significant over a week’s time span. If I’m patient, I’ll get there!
Conclusion
All in all, it was a rather disappointing week. I made isk for sure(sold more than last week), but fell short of some goals. Lost money on Hounds, which offset my gains on other goods. Because of work, and the short runtimes on some of the items I made, production slots sat dormant which lost me money. I was expecting more out of reactions, thankfully it wasn’t a huge time sink skillswise. To be profitable here is going to require micromanagement, and I’m not sure how much time I want to spend on it. Picked up a Capital BP which is cool, but looking longterm I’m not sure if I want to be a component manufacturer and that’s where the money seems to be. I know there are other ships besides the Anshar to build profitably, so I guess I should be looking elsewhere but it’s still a bit of a bummer looking at the broader picture of this narrow set goal.
Goals for next week are to get some graphporn going. Just showing everyone the sales picture is only a very small part of the story. It’s difficult and time consuming filtering out sales made vs purchased assets used to produce those goods vs all the other crap I buy/sell for entertainment on Southpaw(he spent a billion this week on his piracy dreams) into something meaningful to display in graph form. Just showing what I show now is time consuming; I’d rather be blowing stuff up(something I did very little of this week due to work)! But, it’s for science and learning; and that’s what the Uni is supposed to be about. Hopefully I’ll have a generic profit graphic of some sort for the next post. Possibly just using a total assets snapshot week to week, and graphing that would be a good compromise here. I can localize assets somewhat between my industry/traders and Southpaw to show how much money I’m making a week…? Would love some feedback here! Thanks for reading, and hopefully you’re getting something out of this. I know I am!
