Results:
<div style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Late post, but I pulled the numbers at the same time as every other day. I can lose money on the market!  How I did this is simple.  I bought too many (~50) items at a price that gave a total margin of about 36 million.  Someone came in and placed 200+ at a price that halved that margin, so my sell orders fell by 18 mil.  I managed to recoup about 3 mil during my limited time today.

Lesson 1:  Reported sell values are not how much you actually have in the bank!

The underlying problem was that I assumed that buy and sell orders will only move in small increments.  But sometimes someone comes in and crashes the sell price or inflates the buy price.  Smaller inventory and smaller batches can help you avoid this if you cannot do the same, or are looking for short term profits as opposed to longer term investments.

Lesson 2: Don’t count on prices being stable.

I also pruned my buy orders (lost broker’s fees), consolidated inventory in to sell orders (new broker’s fees), and reallocated my buy orders to items that have lower margins but move a little faster.  In the last three hours I recouped another 8 mil, so things should be back on track.

Lesson 3:  Sometimes you have to give up a few high value, high margin orders to increase the velocity of isk.