30 Day Market Challenge

NOTE:  The guide is now up top, the day by day posts are shown after the guide.

This is meant to be a moderate guide for anyone looking to try and make some money station trading in Eve.  I will not go into arbitrage, which is buying in one region and hauling to another, nor is this about industry.  The main focus is making money in stations.  Station trading is the act of placing buy orders above the competition, then selling the goods from those buy orders as sell orders.  The profit is the margin between your (high) buy price and your subsequent (low) sell price.

Time Required

I am a graduate student.  This means I have the luxury of being able to carry a laptop with me all day and periodically (every few hours) log in and check my orders on the market.  At minimum you want to check your orders in the morning, once or twice during the day, and in the evening.  I personally like to check my orders one last time before bed, as that lets you get below or above other US TZ players that may have already turned in for the day.  This obviously changes based on your TZ.  The more you can update, the more successful you will be.  Updating orders takes about 5 to 10 minutes.

Research

How much do you know about Eve?  If you know what most of the modules do, you will be in a good position to understand which modules to buy.  If you do not understand modules, I suggest you enter the Eve blog community or talk to your corp mates.  Understanding how many units to sell and how many an individual buyer might buy is good.  Weapons usually go in sets, for example 7 missile launchers fit on a Drake.  Propulsion mods are only needed once per ship.  Learn this stuff.

Once you understand the mods, there is a wonderful feature in game called Market History.  There are two views, a table and a graph.  The graph is not very useful in my opinion, outside of looking at the historical trend of an item.   What Large Shield Boosters sold for last January is not useful for a day trader.  The direction it is trending is.  The table shows how many items sold each day, and the low and high values that item sold at.  The quantity traded should be over 50, and the margin should somewhat reflect the spread you see in the buy and sell orders in normal view.  Also pay attention to the high and low values.  If they are near each other, and near either the current buy or sell price, odds are the action on the item is slanted towards either buying or selling.  You don;t want to go in on an item that is only selling or only buying.  You cannot flip that item.

WTF?  Useless...

 

That's useful.

This brings us to margin.  Simply put, margin is the difference between the highest sell order and the lowest buy order.  The spread is probably the most you profit on the item.  In reality profit will be less, as you will raise the buy order price and lower the sell order price over time, and eat away at that initial margin.  Taxes and transaction fees will also reduce the margin.  In my estimation, margin of less than about 10% is probably not going to make you much unless you have amazing skills.

Skills

You will need, at minimum, the following:

• Trade 4
• Retail 4
• Accounting 4
• Broker Relations 4

Trade and Retail get you more orders, up to about 54 or so at level 4 in each.  You need enough order slots to have buy and sell orders up to cover each item, give or take.  The reason for this is once you starting flipping orders it helps to be able to list your inventory as you get it.  Accounting and Broker Relations lower the overall cost of making orders, which is not huge, but you can cut it down so that relisting and canceling orders will cost you less.  Handy when you see someone dump 10 modules for a sell order 500k less than everyone else and you want to buy them and relist all your inventory as one order.

Strategies

Here is the meat of this beast.  How do you actually make money?  First, start small.  Buy 5-10 of items with good margins.  Even if you have billions of isk lying around and think “Hey, I can do this market thing!”, don’t invest it all.  Start with low value, decent margin items and learn the speed of competition, watch a few piles of inventory get reduced to nothing as a big fish crashes the sell value, and learn to watch the market.  By watch the market, I mean stick with a few items for a few days.  You’ll start to get a feel for how the market can ebb and flow.  Flip buy orders of 10k to sell orders of 50k.  Get your feet wet.

After a few days, you should have a fair bit more money off your starting investment.  Keep cool.  Expand slowly.  Buy in small amounts that can be flipped easily and quickly.  Remember the 50+ volume number I talked about earlier?  Don’t get suckered into investing in something with a huge margin and low turnover.  You’ll fail to make money.  Get familiar with the idea of “velocity of money”.  More small orders moving faster makes you more money.

At this point you may have a few tens of millions to work with.  Start increasing the value of the items you buy.  Upgrade from 10k modules to 100k modules.  The margins might get a bit better.  I shoot for a margin of 10% or more.  This can vary, but a decent margin leaves you less vulnerable to dramatic changes in the order values.  After a few more days you may be getting close to 100m or two in total capital.  Again, be careful!

Keep limiting your inventory.  A hangar full of modules is a pile of isk that is doing nothing!  You are better off keeping that isk liquid than holding stock.  I rarely buy more than 10 to 20 items at a time, unless they are low value and very high turnover (in the hundreds of orders per day range).  Pretty soon you should have a handle on what to buy, what times of day are good for flipping items, and you should be getting a feel for the market.  Only increase your investments in small increments and keep your eyes on whatever your goal is.

Modules

What to buy?  I focus on meta items.  These are items that cannot be manufactured, and have the “weird” names.  Industrialists produce tons of tech I and tech II items, and the volumes look great, but the margins are low and the competition is fierce.  You will likely never get to buy or sell the “vanilla” items unless you can sit in front of your computer screen for hours every day, and that rather defeats the purpose of this whole endeavor.  If you do not believe me, go look at the market screen for Large Shield Extender II.  I am willing to bet your screen shows a huge list in the buy and sell orders, they are all .01 isking each other, and the margin is so low your taxes and fees will eat any potential profits.

Once you start buying your meta items, you’ll notice margins change.  A lot.  Don’t worry.  If you bought at 300k, intending to sell at 1m, and the sell price drops to 500k while you got your stock, you have two options.  Sell at 500k, and make 200k profit, or hold your stock for a day or a few hours and wait to see what is happening.  Once you get enough isk, you can start looking for sell orders that are driving the price down and buy them, relisting at a higher price.  These are orders where someone lists a small quantity, say 5 units, at a large markdown.  So low that you can buy and relist and make a marginal profit.  As your isk pool grows, you’ll learn how you can manipulate the market prices by doing this.  Sometimes you’ll find a big pile of items selling for way below the next highest order.  This is a profitable opportunity!

Non-Module Items

There are ways to make money off items that are not ship modules.  I have not dabbled in this all that much.  But know this:  You can set remote orders specific to mission hubs to buy cheap mission loot and haul it to a trade hub.  You can buy skillbooks and bring them to a market hub and try to resell them higher in order to take advantage of impatient players.  You can dabble in PI goods, materials, and pirate tags.  All you need to consider is how much time various strategies will take, and if it is worth it to you to branch out from your trade hub and add hauling goods to your trading business.

Location

Where should you set up shop?  At the time of writing, the obvious choices are Jita, Amarr, Rens and Dodixie.  These are the informal trade hubs of Eve. Jita is the biggest, and also has the most orders and players to compete with.  Also keep in mind that many times the weapons that are traded in these hubs relate to the rats nearby.  Dodixie has a lot of Hybrid turrets.  Rens has more Projectiles.  Amarr has a lot of Energy weapons.  Outside Jita margins can be better, but volume is lower.  This may help or hurt you.  I recommend you try out each hub and see which you like, which is more to your pace of play.

Bots

They exist.  Market bots that simply update every damn time you try to place an order.  You can’t do too much about them, other than cancel your buy orders and try to move your sell orders.  Alternatively, you could ladder up the price of the buy order buy setting a few small buy orders and cranking the price slowly up.  This works by slowly, over a few hours, incrementally raising the buy price until the bot stops matching you.  If you can get it high enough, sell your inventory to the bot and find solace in the fact that you gamed the bot for a bit of isk, and hurt the bot’s bottom line.  You won’t make as much, but it can be satisfying.

Is this the game you want to play?

Conclusion

This is not the end-all, be-all guide to market trading.  It is not a guide to market PvP, as such.  It is simply a basic guide to get you started in the market with a few guiding principles.  I like to trade in modules.  You might want to look at something else.  Here are the core ideas in this guide, restated for your edification:

• Learn about what you are trading so you recognize the reasons behind trends and useful quantities.
• Learn the various in game market tools, the price history graphs and tables.
• Watch your margins, and cut your losses if needed.
• Train your skills appropriately to take advantage of the markets.
• Start small and organically, and take time to learn the market, there is a lot going on besides the numbers.
• Stock not trading is isk not growing.

*****The End*****

Daily Reports

I gave a new character 5,000,000 isk, put her in Jita, and tried to see what I could do.  Here are the day by day results of a newbie market trader:

Introduction

I’m blatantly stealing a project from another blogger, the 51 Day Challenge.  Beamer Grey started this but never finished it.  I’m going to pick it up, dust it off, and run it for 30 days.

Goal: 

Make as much money as possible on a new alt by ONLY trading.

Rules: 

• No leaving station
• Only market transactions can be used
• Start with 5 million isk as seed money

Reporting:

Each day I will report the following:

• Starting Isk: The Total Isk from the previous day
• Cash on hand
• Buy Orders Value
• Sells Orders Value
• Total Isk = Cash + Buy Orders + Sell Orders
• Liquid Isk = Cash + Buy Orders: This seems to me to be a useful term to have to illustrate what the actually accessible isk is each day.

I started last night, so the first report comes later today!

*****

Day 1

The results of my first day of the 30 Day Challenge: Not bad for my first foray out.  I bought two skills, Trade and Broker Relations.  As far as modules, I am using a strategy of looking at volume and the margin between buy and sell orders in one station.  The most challenging part of today's work was playing the .01 isk game.  Some items are much more heavily contested, and also have nice margins.  Those are for days when I have lots of time to look at the markets. The biggest question is how to scale up from margins of 10k or a few 100k to something that is more profitable!  A few more days to manage the income, and then I think I'll ahve to start looking at that question. *****

Day 2

Results for Day 2: There you have it.  Results are little less than I wanted, as I have a lot of inventory as of writing time.  I've been going for low quantity, fast turn over, but that slowed down in the afternoon.  The .01 iskers are killing me this afternoon...  I got into some nice margins items, but the competition is fierce, and I have not been able to .01 isk it as much as yesterday. Also, a bit of a side note due to financial considerations: if between my current accounts and this experiment I cannot PLEX the market account, I will have 26 days on the market account, so this may be a 28 Day Challenge depending on how well it works. *****

Day 3

Results:

Doing ok, since I didn't pay much attention today as compared to previous.  Apparently a bit of patience is a virtue.  Still working on balancing margins and quantity. I also am starting to notice weird behaviors and trying to figure them out.  For example when a high margin exists and then a player puts up a sell for a few isk over the highest buy order.  Obviously this is not because that .01 isk matters...  Some sort of manipulation I do not understand.  I'm also learning the value of not overbuying one item when the margin looks nice.  That can backfire, although I have not lost money yet. *****

Day 4

Results:

Good day, inventory is almost nil, orders moved around nicely later in the day.  I had to unload some items due to annoying price swings, so I spun the wheels in place a few times, but overall things are looking good and my range of modules is starting to spread out a bit.  We'll see if I can keep this level up.  So far I  have been roughly doubling my isk, after the first day.

As a side note, at this point I am beating Beamer $94 mil to $6.6 mil.  I wish he was around so we could compare notes... (Update: Beamer started with $473.47 isk, so that last comment may not have been fair.)

*****

Day 5

Results: I was very inactive today, and you can tell.  A few lessons:

• Just because you can buy more expensive items does not mean you should.
• Large margins on smaller items are often better than huge margins on big items.
• The number of items traded only tells you part of the story.

I went on a big buy order spree and my velocity of money has slowed.  I am learning that velocity of isk is more important than margins in a lot of ways.  You can't flip things unless they are churning, and less churn means less total profit from quantity sold.  Tomorrow will be a return to more smaller items as opposed to less big items.

That's all for today.

*****

Day 6

Results:

Back on track, although a few things are still staying more tied up than I would like.  A few nice margin orders that should reap good rewards should I get them, and a few items that are of such low value that I am letting the orders just run in case the markets swings back in my favor.

I am rapidly reaching the point where simply doing market triage on margins and updating orders is becoming far more time consuming.  The isk per real time I spend in the game is not quite what I would get from, say, missioning over the same period.  One hour with 1 or two mineral checks is not equivalent to one hour of blasting through L4s on my combat character.  With current mineral prices, I am also better off just semi-afk mining when I am at home.  That is to say, my velocity of money has hit a bit of a (personal) ceiling, in that to increase it anymore, I would need to devote more time, and have orders move quicker due to other players.

This brings up an interesting quandry:  Due to my self imposed rules, is it acceptable for me to venture out of the station for trade-only related activities, like regional arbitrage?  And will it make me enough money to be worth the extra time I cannot spend managing orders?  I have not decided.

Tomorrow will likely be slow along with the weekend, as I will have a much busier schedule and will not be able to monitor orders as much.  I predict a rather flat Day 7.

*****

Day 7

Results:

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.

*****

Day 8

Results:

Getting back on track.  I made good on my promise of more, smaller trades.  This is my third best day so far.  To answer a question in previous comments, I'll elaborate on my strategies a little bit.  I'm not going to tell which items I am working in, but the general approach I am using. I tend to look for items that have at least 20% margin.  The only things I break this rule for are some items that have very high turnover (500+ per day) and that will net me in the 1 mil range on turnover.  There are a few reasons for this:

• High margins tend to burst after a short window, as someone undercuts to try and move items or, I assume, manipulate the market to their advantage.
• Turnover, as listed in game, does not tell you if those are buy or sell orders.  Nothing is fun like buying 50 items and realizing that the movement is all on the Buy Order side of the equation.
• Many of the large price, large spread orders seem to have robots updating the buy orders.  I can't say these are bots, but I am sorely tempted to get a stopwatch and log attempts to talk...  I'm not bitter, at all.

I also limit orders to some extent because of how long it takes to update when I start to get over 30-40 total buy and sell orders.  Market trading is literally spreadsheets in space as no other action in the game I have yet undertaken.

*****

Day 9

Results: Not too much to say today.  I am going to be gone over the weekend (Days 10 and 11), and I have been trading in Jita so far.  My plan, given the whole "Jita Burns" event on the 24th, is to let my orders wind down while I am gone and move shop when I get back.  I suspect business will not be good once the camp hits, and I plan to be out of the way.  In order to stay true to my plan, I am going to move only myself when I go.  Since I will be missing this weekend, it seems fair to move when my orders have essentially stopped, and just transfer my pool of isk. Due to all of this, I expect a loss come next post due to losing some broker's fees.

*****

Day 10 & 11

Results: Not trading = not making any money!  I also realized some loss winding down Jita as I prepare to move to another trade hub.  Trying to get one last set of items to move. Tomorrow shall be a new day in a new hub, onward!

*****

Day 12

Results: So that's a good day.  My best overall margin so far.  Nothing special happened, except I left Jita and went to another major hub.  Rhymes with  a car.  I'm still using a similar mix of boring ship modules as my bread and butter.  There are less orders, so the .01 isk game is a little less intense.  On the flip side, people will raise prices or lower them in much larger amount, so that's fun.  An entrepreneurial note, watch the sell orders that are  a few isk above the buy orders.  They can help when you want some stock, or they can be a sign to get out if the quantity is higher than you can snap up and turn around. I'm glad the day went well, because I was starting to get a bit weary of the Jita trade scene, and a nice day makes the whole trade enterprise more fun.  I may have some fun charts coming, If I can be arsed to censor the data down.  Maybe I'll post it on Day 15 as the "Half Marathon" post.

*****

Day 13

Results:

I broke $300,000,000!  Hooray!  I was really hoping to get past the 300m mark today, and I did it.  And boy did the market get busy today.  Patch brings more people to the game I guess.  A few notes on the day:

• You can't see it, but I dropped about 8m on skills today, so the real total would have been 309m, but such is life.
• Faction modules are on the market.  I put in some dummy orders to maybe catch some people unawares.  We'll see if that ever pans out.
• At my current rate, I should be able to afford a PLEX, but I imagine we are in for some market volatility soon (tm), so that remains to be seen.

The net change percent was low today, compared to yesterday, but the actual change was my third best day.   I'm also running out of order slots, with Retail 3.  That is going to be upgraded once I finish some Accounting training to lower the loss to Sales Tax.  Yes, it's fractions of a percent, but as my volume of isk traded goes up, those percents make a difference at corner cases for margin.  At some point I may also have to consider standings.

Finally, I have only been station trading so far.  In a few days I may be able to start training for distance.  That will present a new sets of questions and challenges.

*****

Day 14

Results:

Late update, but I had a large presentation today and Wednesdays are always slow for me given my schedule. Anyhow, the only big news is that I royally borked an order by typing the wrong digit into a sell order and losing about 10m in potential profit as I sold to barely over my buy orders.  If you missed it, I culled some knowledge into the post immediately preceding this one in order to try and actually teach people a few things that I have learned in the last two weeks.

Tomorrow I plan on putting up some pretty charts that show some fun stats about my adventures.  Lines!  Colors! Invented terms!

Also, anyone notice that PLEX prices seem to be creeping down?  That's good news for me.  I am trying to go all PLEX in Eve Online, so I will embrace the falling price trend.

*****

Day 15 (With Figures!)

Results: Started out slow, picked up, and then someone decided to crash a few items.  I still profited, but I lost out on 30m of potential profits.  It would have been fun to clear 400m today, but oh well.  I also missed out on the US TZ evenings, which is always a nice time to make some quick flips as people come home to unload and stock up. Now for some more info on my character. Trade Skills:

• Accounting 3
• Broker Relations 4
• Marketing 2
• Retail 4
• Trade 4

And now, Charts!  I have been tracking all of this using the wonderful program Excel.  I love Excel.  It does maths and makes charts.  My main book tracks the stats I give in results everyday, and lets me "keep score" against myself.  Two graphics I use are shown below, and to reiterate, I track:

• Ending Isk (Sell Orders + Buy Orders + Cash)
• Sell Orders
• Buy Orders
• Cash
• Liquid Isk (Cash + Buy Orders)
• PLEXline (PLEX Sell Order / 30 Days * Current Day)
• PLEX Goal (Plex Order)
• Margin

Overall Results Daily Margin

The PLEXline is the lowest value of a PLEX that I can buy in the region I am in, plotted from $0 at day 0 and increasing each day by the PLEX value divided by 30, and multiplied by the day I am on in the month.  That means on day 15, the PLEXline is 245m isk, based on a lowest PLEX value of 490m.  This lets me see  the pace at which I need to make isk to pay for the account, and how far above or below that amount I am on any given day.

The PLEX Goal is just a horizontal gate I need to reach to give a relative idea of where I am overall.

The Margin graph shows my actual gain each day relative to my starting isk amount.

Fun fact:  The buy order and cash line are mirror images of each other.  This makes sense if you think about it for a while.  They are simply two sides of the same pool of money varying based on how much I am investing into the market.

An important note in all of this is that I track Liquid Isk separately from Ending Isk.  I do this because Sell Orders have no real value, they are only the estimate of how much I stand to gain when I complete all the Sell Orders.  Liquid Isk is what I could actually spend if I cancelled every Buy Order.  I do not include assests or the real value of Sell Orders, as the real value of those would be the highest buy rates, and that's a lot of extra typing in Excel.  I tracked the "real isk" amount for two days and stopped.  Most of my margins sit in the 25% to 50% range, so I guess a useful estimate of real isk would be (and the graph):

Buy Orders + Cash + Sell Orders * .65

The graph:

How much isk I actually have? One last chart.  I fit a trendline to my current data, and this is what happens: I can haz PLEX? The PLEXline will be crossed on day 21.  Not too shabby. Also, as a bonus, here is the EveHQ Prism Report of everything I have completed some form of transaction on.  I have no idea how accurate it is, but I wanted to add it to show that I am not doing anything exotic. (NOTE:  The list is all the way at the bottom now.) ******

Day 16

Results:

I didn't make much today (yesterday), and that's because I was weary of market trading.  I did expand my operations a bit though.  I'll talk on that a bit more tomorrow (or later today). I hope you enjoyed the temporally displaced post.

*****

Day 17 & 18

Results:

It's another double day.  Weekends are a pain in the butt to keep updated, so I didn't really bother to try this weekend.

I also bent the rules (or broke them).  I've started reprocessing some items that are essentially printing isk.  I moved a large order of modules to another hub to not lose out on some 20m in profit.  I have also deployed long term buy orders across many stations that I will pick up once a month or so.  None of these things required any extra skills training though.  I am in the process of getting a throwaway Badger going, as I will need some hauling capacity later.  Finally, I am also reselling skills, because apparently people are too lazy to fly one jump.  I'll take their money gladly.

The biggest change in the last few days is I have gotten out of the Tech II market almost completely.  It's rather hard to compete with players throwing around billions in orders, whereas the the lower volume in some of the meta mods is a bit more manageable and bulk buying power is a bit less annoying.

I've also spent a bit more time trolling orders looking for those buy-order-fill orders, and items that are way below the next group of sells orders.  That's a nice quick way to flip inventory and make small margins on it.

Oh, there was one other thing.  I cleared both the PLEX goal AND half a bil!  Woo!

*****

Day 19

Results:

I got bored again today.  Instead of station trading much I went out and collected a bunch of items on 5-jump buy orders.  First, I am never doing that again.  Not my play style.  Second, I got to see a lot of stations I had never noticed before.  That was fun, but not something to repeat in this context. I also closed out a lot of orders, hence the lack of buy orders when I ran these numbers.  Trying to decide if I want to stay where I am or engage in more options afield.  Remote buy orders are something I need to look into in order to get more large margin modules to take to the trade hub. Finally, I think I am getting close to PLEX time to keep the account going.  I have a few more days, and I'd like to get up around 700m before trading in a large portion.  Having a big pool of isk allows for more freedom to manipulate orders into my favor, and I don;t want to drop back down to 50m in total cash at this point.

*****

Day 20

Results:

Banner day!  New record for margin, at 108m.  That was nice.  One cool thing about have more liquid isk is the ability to go in a buy up orders that are trying to push down the overall margin.  You sacrifice some margin on a few items to keep your margin on the bulk of your goods.  This gets you more isk.  Win. Based on my success so far, and my lack of desire to spend any more time updating the same orders, I have begun training additional trade alts.  The more observant readers of my blog may have noted that I currently run three accounts, roughly defined as Combat, Industrialist, and Trader/Corp/Blarg.  This means I have 9 slots, and three can be up and running at any given time.  The obvious next step to enhance profits is to have eyes, and orders, stationed in or near every trade hub so I can capitalize on arbitrage. For those who are unfamiliar, trading has a few flavors.  Station trading is what I have been mainly involved in up till now.  This consists of setting high buy orders and selling to low sell orders in the same station.  But this approach is weak to those that have more power (read isk) than you, as they can manipulate markets and leave you with a pile of suddenly worthless inventory.  Arbitrage is another method of trading, where you scout price disparities between regions and buy in one place, haul the goods to another place, and sell for profit. My tentative plan is to have eyes in Jita, Amarr, Rens and Dodixie, and perhaps train up a suitable hauler who can run between these, moving goods to the best location to sell in.  At my current pace, one account in one station can pay for itself and have excess isk at the end of the month.  I may be able to get two PLEXes if the pace keeps going.  Four characters will have less profit per account due to time, but I imagine it will still manage to pay for multiple accounts. This plan will take some time to implement, however.  Skills must be trained, and the isk must flow!

*****

Day 21

Results:

Not much happening today, finals week is upon me.  I may update with more info, but for now I will just leave the results.

*****

Day 22

Results:

Rollin' along.  Trading on the margins.  I need to move some inventory at this point, my balance is getting a bit heavy in non-liquid assets.  I have a breather from non-Eve obligations tomorrow, so I'll be working on that a bit.  Development of additional alts will also likely be on the docket, or at least seeding them.  My posts this week have been a  bit shorter due to:

• Finals.  I'm in school and those take a fair bit of work.
• P90X workouts.  Roc would be so proud.  I'm working on my meat-space capsule and damn if those don't kick you in the arse.
• Once you get the hang of buying high and selling low, most of the work becomes updating orders and browsing the market for trends and deals.  There is not much technique, just a lot of reading the charts and graphs.

Also, my goal is revised.  I want to clear 1 billion isk and have enough to keep rolling by cashing in for two PLEXes.  As Hulkageddon is going strong, I am not bringing as much income in on my miner account.

*****

Day 23 to 25

Results:

Bit of a slow weekend for a few reasons.  First, I was not that motivated.  Second I was amazingly busy with wedding planning and an arm injury.  Third, Amarr got the best of me and I decided to move on to another hub.  This lead to selling off stock at lower than expected prices in order to not be hauling anything besides skillbooks when I left.

Interestingly, it seems that a few weeks after I get into an hub, other traders come join the party and margins go way down, .01 isk wars go way up, and I find it better to move to another spot.  I am wondering if others have noticed this in the day trading scene?  It makes sense that people follow the money, and I am starting to think a huge part of this is anticipating the changes and staying ahead of that curve.  I don't have the isk to do full blown manipulation, but I wonder how many people are out there that can and do crash margins for a few days to get rid of people like me.

Another thought:  Weekends suck for market trading.  All the weekend warriors come out, run missions, sell stock and undercut the bejesus out of things (or so I imagine).  In the worst case, someone with a lot of stock follows suit after  a few small orders undercut, and drops their price considerably. Then the profit on flipping 20-30 modules disappears into the CCP database forever.  Or maybe I just need more isk and better tracking tools to engage in longer term investments.  Investing versus day trading if you will.

Final thought.  I finished collecting all my remote buys before leaving Amarr space.  It made me a few million, but nothing even resembling the numbers I am going for, and certainly not enough to be worth the time it took to gather the items.  I trashed about half of them after looking at the margins.  Future remote buy orders will need to be tailored much more specifically at mini-hubs in the region so I am only going to a few systems to get my inventory and flipping it becomes less of a chore. I am starting to really dislike the region limit on modifying orders as well.  With instantaneous interstellar communication, I fail to see (outside of gameplay mechanics) why we can't at least phone in order modifications.

*****

Day 26

Results:

Nothing like a good day to wipe clean the previous three.  86 mil to go to hit the revised goal.  Not a whole lot to say, except meta modules are still where it's at.  In an case of synchronicity, Ripard Teg was talking about my experience in the previous market challenge post here.  I thought it was a nice explanation that I failed to realize.

*****

Addendum Day 15 Transaction Trading Report

from Monday, April 09, 2012 to Thursday, April 26, 2012
Item	Amount Traded	Average Unit Profit	Total Profit
100MN Afterburner II	10.00	696,441.72	6,964,417.21
10MN MicroWarpdrive II	2.00	168,664.68	337,329.36
1200mm Artillery Cannon I	7.00	334,995.60	2,344,969.17
1200mm Artillery Cannon II	12.00	1,229,084.83	14,749,017.98
1200mm Heavy 'Scout' Artillery I	3.00	760,119.10	2,280,357.30
125mm Prototype Gauss Gun	6.00	136,897.88	821,387.30
1400mm Gallium Cannon	8.00	458,853.80	3,670,830.38
1400mm 'Scout' Artillery I	13.00	807,271.50	10,494,529.46
150mm Light AutoCannon I	70.00	24,171.72	1,692,020.58
150mm Light 'Scout' Autocannon I	5.00	401,670.29	2,008,351.45
1MN Afterburner II	10.00	528,613.80	5,286,138.03
200mm Compressed Coil Gun I	14.00	95,853.95	1,341,955.32
200mm Light Carbine Repeating Cannon I	20.00	198,975.35	3,979,506.96
200mm Railgun II	5.00	640,696.27	3,203,481.37
200mm 'Scout' Accelerator Cannon	10.00	153,799.95	1,537,999.53
250mm Light Artillery Cannon I	20.00	52,497.07	1,049,941.41
350mm Compressed Coil Gun I	5.00	698,689.97	3,493,449.85
425mm AutoCannon II	58.00	329,119.97	19,088,958.43
425mm Medium Gallium Machine Gun	10.00	471,987.32	4,719,873.18
650mm Artillery Cannon II	4.00	228,790.37	915,161.48
650mm Medium 'Scout' Artillery I	1.00	2,667,239.76	2,667,239.76
720mm Howitzer Artillery II	6.00	646,737.61	3,880,425.67
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II	68.00	157,413.69	10,704,130.74
Advanced 'Limos' Heavy Missile Bay I	51.00	251,540.95	12,828,588.43
Anode Electron Particle Cannon I	5.00	362,997.51	1,814,987.55
Anode Neutron Particle Cannon I	15.00	360,456.20	5,406,842.98
Arkonor Mining Crystal II	3.00	496,999.20	1,490,997.60
Basic Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane	36.00	65,316.19	2,351,382.99
Beta Reactor Control: Capacitor Power Relay I	10.00	143,621.09	1,436,210.89
Beta Reactor Control: Diagnostic System I	10.00	134,489.90	1,344,898.95
Cap Recharger I	78.00	20,190.13	1,574,829.98
Command Processor I	10.00	304,994.96	3,049,949.55
Conflagration L	10.00	332,865.95	3,328,659.50
Covert Ops Cloaking Device II	3.00	1,466,335.07	4,399,005.21
Damage Control I	6.00	452.02	2,712.12
Drone Synaptic Relay Wiring	171	2.1	359.1
Dual 180mm AutoCannon I	23.00	109,948.96	2,528,825.99
Dual 250mm Prototype Gauss Gun	20.00	55,231.23	1,104,624.67
Dual 650mm Repeating Artillery II	8.00	1,038,092.90	8,304,743.23
Dual Heavy Modulated Pulse Energy Beam I	10.00	324,178.02	3,241,780.23
Dual Light Pulse Laser II	25.00	234,712.98	5,867,824.46
Dual Modulated Pulse Energy Beam I	13.00	443,497.86	5,765,472.21
Electron Blaster Cannon II	3.00	988,993.19	2,966,979.56
Expanded Probe Launcher II	3.00	1,875,631.86	5,626,895.57
Experimental 100MN Afterburner I	50.00	51,279.43	2,563,971.37
Experimental 10MN MicroWarpdrive I	150.00	71,752.98	10,762,947.68
Experimental 1MN Afterburner I	157.00	33,494.67	5,258,663.82
F-90 Positional Sensor Subroutines	1	-0.01	-0.01
Fleeting Propulsion Inhibitor I	4.00	1,599,994.47	6,399,977.86
Heat Sink I	50.00	18,319.04	915,952.14
Heavy Modulated Energy Beam I	10.00	223,806.74	2,238,067.43
Heavy Unstable Power Fluctuator I	15.00	186,308.13	2,794,621.93
Ion Blaster Cannon II	9.00	538,250.56	4,844,255.05
Kernite Mining Crystal II	7.00	190,701.46	1,334,910.21
Kinetic Deflection Amplifier II	5.00	189,998.69	949,993.44
Large Armor Repairer I	60.00	260,078.24	15,604,694.11
Large Automated Carapace Restoration	20	-1.01	-20.2
Large Energy Transfer Array II	9.00	963,890.86	8,675,017.74
Large Remote Armor Repair System II	5.00	458,622.08	2,293,110.40
Large Shield Booster II	6.00	255,266.13	1,531,596.75
Light Electron Blaster I	100.00	10,919.84	1,091,983.89
Light Electron Blaster II	2.00	526,061.25	1,052,122.50
Light Neutron Blaster I	288.00	24,411.14	7,030,407.57
Mark I Generator Refitting: Diagnostic System	100.00	13,322.19	1,332,219.34
Medium Anode Pulse Particle Stream I	10.00	76,479.45	764,794.50
Medium Inefficient Armor Repair Unit	19.00	17,678.86	335,898.30
Medium Modulated Pulse Energy Beam I	4.00	819,009.95	3,276,039.80
Medium Nanobot Accelerator I	5.00	875,687.91	4,378,439.54
Medium Pulse Laser II	33.00	358,652.64	11,835,537.14
Medium Remote Armor Repair System II	5.00	547,998.41	2,739,992.07
Medium Semiconductor Memory Cell I	1.00	2,147,877.19	2,147,877.19
Micro Auxiliary Power Core I	10.00	88,996.35	889,963.50
Micro Auxiliary Power Core II	5.00	1,867,970.90	9,339,854.51
Mining Laser Upgrade II	18.00	737,279.38	13,271,028.88
Mobile Medium Warp Disruptor I	3.00	1,279,051.74	3,837,155.21
Modal Electron Particle Accelerator I	3.00	2,120,966.12	6,362,898.37
Modulated Strip Miner II	20.00	1,596,866.37	31,937,327.35
Phased Weapon Navigation Array Generation Extron	12.00	1,287,903.89	15,454,846.69
Prototype 'Arbalest' Heavy Assault Missile Launcher I	2.00	565,279.21	1,130,558.41
Prototype Cloaking Device I	1.00	209,993.82	209,993.82
Prototype Sensor Booster	50.00	86,737.80	4,336,889.79
Scorch M	2.00	194,843.99	389,687.98
Scorch S	4.00	186,791.91	747,167.64
Shield Boost Amplifier I	10.00	169,872.73	1,698,727.27
Shield Boost Amplifier II	9.00	111,651.74	1,004,865.64
Shield Power Relay I	100.00	20,028.50	2,002,849.58
Shield Power Relay II	10.00	158,981.66	1,589,816.64
Shield Recharger II	36.00	63,734.36	2,294,437.07
Small Auxiliary Thrusters I	10.00	67,691.84	676,918.40
Small Cargohold Optimization I	2.00	349,998.97	699,997.94
Small Energy Neutralizer II	5.00	636,564.96	3,182,824.79
Small Shield Booster II	4.00	175,395.40	701,581.58
Tachyon Beam Laser II	4.00	1,114,158.30	4,456,633.20
Tachyon Modulated Energy Beam I	45.00	260,934.48	11,742,051.62
Thermic Dissipation Field II	26.00	258,636.17	6,724,540.40
Upgraded 1MN Microwarpdrive I	5.00	41,323.18	206,615.92
Warp Core Stabilizer II	35.00	384,619.21	13,461,672.34
Warp Scrambler II	2.00	299,888.33	599,776.65
X-Large C5-L Emergency Shield Overload I	10.00	753,397.99	7,533,979.93
X-Large Shield Booster II	15	581,089.96	8,716,349.34