Month End Update - September 2025

This challenge is now going on for 39 days and I have finished my first complete month.

Learnings and tips

It makes a lot of fun. Though, I think, this kind of game play style is certainly more suitable for players who like crunching numbers and developing spreadsheets. Not the best fit for someone who prefers ratting, exploring or pvp'ing.

I like ratting, but I consider myself even more as a number's guy. So, good for me.

I certainly spent more time creating and improving my spreadsheets than being actually ingame.
Updating orders daily is tedious. But it's part of the process. And I have only 17 orders at most to update per character, so I won't complain. And as Croda showed in his excellent post it is necessary.

Tips for making this process more efficiently are:

1. Using the mouse wheel to update prices if the price differences are small (see Croda's blog entry on this topic) 
   
   
2. I created a spreadsheet where I can filter for all orders that need to be updated.  I copy the names of the items and paste them into the Quickbar in my market window. Then I work my way through the list. This way I avoid having to scroll through all active orders.
   
   
3. When setting up sell orders I used to put them up one by one and entering prices manually. This was tedious and not very efficient. Especially as I already have them listed in my spreadsheet with names and prices. I figured out I can simply copy the item names and my target selling price. Then I go into my hangar, mark all items to sell and click sell. When the market window opens I import the data and simply click sell on the bottom side of the window. 
   
   

I haven't figured out yet at what day time it's best to update orders to keep them the most competitive as long as possible. Will have a closer look in the next days.

Automatic updating spreadsheets (average prices and numbers of days an item is traded) is still an issue. I guess I do too many requests at once which results in reaching some kind of server limit. Interestingly, this happens only when pulling market history data. I'm using the free online excel version and the eve online excel add-in.

To reduce fees and contract rewards I reduced the collateral from 120% to 110% of the expected sell price, starting from October on. There is a risk of courier contracts being failed on purpose if the contractor decides (s)he can sell the items for more. But in this case I will still make a decent profit - and I get my money much sooner than if I have to wait for the items to sell on the market.

Numbers

As expected and communicated earlier, the taxes and fees an alpha character has to pay are having a big negative impact on the overall performance.

In September I had sales of 10,5 billion ISK and generated a net profit of 442 million ISK. My net profit margin was 4,2%.

I don't know if this high or low. Maybe you post your margins in the comments section below for comparison. Just remember that my characters are still alpha clones having an effective tax rate of more than 23% this month.

My wealth rose to 2.6 billion ISK which is made up from:

Next milestone: Wealth of 3 billion ISK = equivalent to 500 Plex

(As I don't have a lot of (real-life) accounting skills, I do welcome any tips and suggestions where and how to improve the way I present my numbers here.)

Items I trade

I trade almost exclusively in modules and implants.
Some of them have very little to no competition while others are showing 4 or more active sellers.

Is my goal still achievable?

While the overall goal of plexing the account is doable for sure, it all comes down to the question: 
How long will it take?

So far my average daily net profit has been around 66 million ISK.
To reach my short-term goal I need to have a total wealth worth of 1.000 Plex.
At current ingame Plex prices (5,4 million ISK per Plex) I need a total wealth of 5,4 billion ISK. 
So I need additional 2,757 billion ISK.

Making 66 million ISK per day it will last another 41 days to finally achieve the short-term goal. 
I could liquidate all assets as soon as I have the wealth to buy 500 Plex, but that would leave me with a plexed account but no ingame money left.  So no real option.

If I'm able to scale up my net profit per day by either reducing fees (updating less frequently) or generating higher margins through an improved buy-sell-strategy I could reach my goal faster. 

Let's see what the future will bring.

Update after 4 weeks in the challenge

 Where did I start from?

4 weeks ago I started a challenge with the goal of making enough ISK to be able to plex a completely fresh account in the MMORPG Eve Online by only doing regional trading as single source of income. 

I started with a total wealth of 75 million ISK, one character in Jita, one in Amarr and one in Dodixie.

After 11 days I reached my first milestone by having a wealth of more than 1 billion ISK.

What has happened during the last week?

Simply put: Competition is getting tougher where I sell (Amarr + Dodixie).

• For many items in the price range between 20 and 200 million ISK I see now 4 or more competitors updating orders at least daily.
  To stay competitive I need to update more often which cuts a huge chunk into my estimated profit.

• For items in the price range above 200 million ISK there is less competition. Nevertheless, these traders are active traders who update daily as well. And these updates are often not only one tick downwards but often times 10 million ISK or more at once.
  (Guess I found some items where I'm directly competing against Croda. Ouch!)

• I changed my requirements how often an item is being traded.
  For now I removed items that are traded on more than 80% or less than 20%.
  I calculate trading frequency by the formula: days where trades happened / specific time frame.
  An item which has 80 days with data of completed trades during a time frame of 100 days has a trade frequency of 80%.

• I experimented with different margins for initial sell prices, down to 35% (which is my absolute minimum required margin).
  Sometimes there are simply not enough items with a high enough margin to sell. Especially when looking for ones with few active competitors. 

• I also recognized I was competing against my Omega account in some items. So I stopped updating these items on my omega account. 

How are my numbers?

Past week:

• Revenue:
• In the last week I made sales of 3,34 billion ISK for a total of 45 orders.
  That makes an average sell price of 74,2 million ISK per order.

• Amarr generated 1,748 billion ISK revenue with 26 orders for an average sell price of 67,2 million ISK.

• Dodixie generated 1,591 billion ISK revenue with 19 orders for an average sell price of 83,7 million ISK.

• This is surprising as my feeling throughout the week was that Amarr is running a lot better than Dodixie.
  It was in terms of completed sell orders, but as we can see, number of completed orders is just one part of the equation. Average price is the other one.

• Costs:
• I paid  250,5 million ISK in Sales Tax which comes down to the expected 7,5% for an alpha character.

• I paid 341,7 million ISK in Brokers Fee which comes down to 10,2% of my inital sell order price. 
  As my base broker fee is 2,38%, the difference of 7,82% means I had - on average - to adjust prices 3,2 times before an item was sold.

• I paid out 55,0 million ISK in rewards for courier contracts.
  I pay 1% reward on the collateral which finally comes down to 1,6% of total actual revenue.

Since the beginning of the challenge (4 weeks):

• Revenue:
• I made sales of 8,413 billion ISK.

• Amarr generated 4,705 billion ISK with 109 completed sell orders for an average sell price of 43,2 million ISK.

• Dodixie generated 3,707 billion ISK with 84 completed sell orders for an average sell price of 44,1 million ISK.

• Costs:
• I paid  629,1 million ISK in Sales Tax which comes down to the expected 7,5% for an alpha character.

• I paid 850,7 million ISK in Brokers Fee which comes down to 10,1% of my inital sell order price. 
  As my base broker fee is 2,38%, the difference of 7,72% means I had - on average - to adjust prices 3,2 times before an item was sold.

• I paid out 139,4 million ISK in rewards for courier contracts.
  I pay 1% reward on the collateral which finally comes down to 1,7% of total actual revenue.

These are my current numbers:

I take a provision of 25% against sell orders and contracts to reflect the fees and potential price adjustments I have to make before finally selling an item. 

Week over week my total wealth grew by 3,9% or 88,4 million ISK. Less than expected and less than what I made on average in the past. 

Let's see if my adjustments will generate a higher profit in the upcoming week.


Happy trading and manufacturing to you all. Enjoy the game! o7

The road to Plex is ... bumpy - Update after 3 weeks in the challenge

 Where did I start from

3 weeks ago I started a challenge with the goal of making enough ISK to be able to plex a completely fresh account in the MMORPG Eve Online by only doing regional trading as single source of income. 

I started with a total wealth of 75 million ISK, one character in Jita, one in Amarr and one in Dodixie.

After 11 days I reached my first milestone by having a wealth of more than 1 billion ISK.

What has happened the last couple of days?

Last week has been incredibly slow in terms of growth.
During the week there was no significant turnover and even the weekend was not satisfactory. 

I faced a lot of competition requiring me to update almost all my orders on a daily basis. 
This cut much into the - overall poor - profits. 

How are my numbers?

In the first 14 days in September I made sales of 4,658 billion ISK.

I paid 349 million ISK in Sales Tax which comes down to the expected 7,5% for an alpha character.

I paid 474,2 million ISK in Brokers Fee.
This one is hefty, coming down to 10,12% of my revenues. My base broker fee is 2,38%. So on top of the initial broker fee of 2,38% I pay another 7,74 % in broker fees for updating orders.

This high amount in fees reflects the fact that I experienced a lot more competition than in the weeks before. And I had to update my orders more often than in the beginning of the challenge.

I paid out 84,8 million ISK in rewards for courier contracts.
I pay 1% reward on the collateral which finally comes down to 1,8% of total actual revenue.


And these are my current numbers:

I take a provision of 25% against sell orders and contracts to reflect the fees and potential price adjustments I have to make before finally selling an item. 

What did I learn?

General:

Finding items to sell that meet my criteria is getting tougher. 
With small capital to invest there are a lot of possibilities with few competition to find in the market. 
There are still lots of items to trade in the price range between 30 and 150 million ISK. But the limitation of having only 34 possible sell orders available, facing very high fees and tax rates and entering a price area where competition is more serious makes progression tougher. 

I could keep trading in the lower priced items I traded in the beginning of my challenge. 
This would probably result in having a lot of ISK in my wallet doing just nothing.
But I'd like to keep my ISK invested as much as possible for it to gain a return.
So I need to find items that are trading often enough to see a satisfactory turnover, but not so often that they attract a lot of competitors.

Same goes for margins.
They need to be high enough to cover my costs and return a sufficient profit at the end, but margins must not be so high that additional competition gets invited.

As Taxes and actual Broker Fees cut almost 18 % off of the revenue I make. Adding rewards and other fees into the calculation I pay about 20% in fees. 


Is my goal still achievable?

While the overall goal of plexing the account is doable for sure, it all comes down to the question:
How long will it take?

So far my average daily net profit has been around 64 million ISK.
To reach my short-term goal I need to have a total wealth worth of 1.000 Plex.
At current ingame Plex prices (5,5 million ISK per Plex) I need a total wealth of 5,5 billion ISK. 

So I need additional 3,241 billion ISK.
Making 64 million ISK per day it will last another 50 days to finally achieve the short-term goal. 

I could liquidate all assets as soon as I have the wealth to buy 500 Plex, but that would leave me with a plexed account but no ingame money left. 

If I'm able to scale up my net profit per day by either reducing fees (updating less frequently) or generating higher margins through an improved buy-sell-strategy I could reach my goal faster. 

I'm thinking about how to optimize my strategy, but I haven't figured out yet what exactly I could improve.

Let's see what the current week's progression will look like.


Happy trading, manufacturing to you all. Enjoy the game! o7

What is my strategy?

I currently buy items between 22 million and 112 million ISK and I sell them between 4,5 million and 270 million ISK. 

I don't focus too much on total gross profit when considering an item to buy. 
I look at the potential daily gross profit I am able to make with an item, considering how often it is actually traded.
If an item is traded on average every 5 days and my potential gross profit would be 100 million ISK, this item has a potential gross profit on a daily basis of 100 / 5 = 20 million ISK.  

This way I avoid getting sucked in an item which seems to have a large potential gross profit, but is only sold so often. 

Other than that I simply try to copy Croda's strategy by trading in low-volume, low supply and slowly moving items. Though I do this on a wayyyy smaller scale.

Alpha to Omega by regional trading - Update after 2 weeks

Where did I start from

2 weeks ago I started a challenge with the goal of making enough ISK to be able to plex a completely fresh account in the MMORPG Eve Online by only doing regional trading as single source of income. 

I started with a total wealth of 75 million ISK, one character in Jita, one in Amarr and one in Dodixie.

After 11 days I reached my first milestone by having a wealth of more than 1 billion ISK.

What has happened the last couple of days?

Sales last week have been slow during the weekdays but accelerated during the weekend.

As my order slots are limited to 17 per character I need a relatively high turnover. That means I dont't have the luxury to keep orders up that have been undercut dramatically, which happens at times.
So I have to bite the bullet to get rid of items even below purchase prices just to keep my ISK moving and being able to reinvest. This has happened several times in the last week. 

The good news is, that I still made a nice profit overall.

What did I learn?

General:

Most of the time I dedicate to this challenge I do spend in fact outside of the game.
I use the Eve Online Excel Add-in to track my progress, find items to sell, etc.
Refining my spreadsheets by fixing errors, making search and updating processes more efficiently and by constantly adjusting the criterias on which items to trade in takes more time than I thought in the beginning. 
But it's worthwile. I often find things to improve and it keeps me improving my excel skills. At least I hope so. ;)

I use the free online version of Excel for this challenge. And I recognized that it is not advisable to create and use tables in the spreadsheets. I constantly faced errors when trying to refresh the data.

An issue I constantly face:

The main issue I still have not resolved is that some data is pulled correctly only for some rows in a column. After that it shows an error and I have to manually update the errors.
Simply hitting F9 or Shift+F9 doesn't give the correct values.
I need to enter a cell in a different column first and then go back to the colum with the error to finally be able to update it.
Amongst a lot of other data my spreadsheet pulls the number of days an item is traded during a specific time frame. And I have a list of about 440 items.
The formula I use and where I constantly run into errors is =EVEONLINE.MARKET_HISTORY(region ID;item id;number of days).days_with_data

As I consider myself as someone with average excel skills at best, maybe someone can give me a hint, how to fix this problem. 

What is my daily routine?

Actual playing time comes to about 30 minutes a day, while splitting these 30 minutes in several batches per day. 

Step 1:

• In the morning I update sell orders ingame. 

Step 2:

• After that I update my spreadsheet, buy items, create courier contracts and put them in the haulers channel.

Step 3:

• During the day I check my spreadsheet if the contracts are completed. If so I enter the game, put the new items up for sale and update existing sell orders if necessary.
  
  

If, in the meantime, my wallet size rose significantly I repeat Step 2. Otherwise I repeat Step 1 - 3 in the evening again.

As already mentioned, the 30 minutes is only the time I actually spend ingame.
The time to work in my spreadsheets is at least the same per day. I expect this to be reduced in the future when I have fixed most errors and when I have established a - for my purpose - sufficiently efficient process using the spreadsheet.
   

How are my numbers?

In September I made sales of 2.3 billion ISK so far.

And these are my current numbers:

I take a provision of 25% against sell orders and contracts to reflect the fees and potential price adjustments I have to make before finally selling an item. 

What is my strategy?

I currently buy items between 3 million and 140 million ISK and I sell them between 4,5 million and 270 million ISK. 

I don't focus too much on total gross profit when considering an item to buy. 
I look at the potential daily gross profit I am able to make with an item, considering how often it is actually traded.
If an item is traded on average every 5 days and my potential gross profit would be 100 million ISK, this item has a potential gross profit on a daily basis of 100 / 5 = 20 million ISK.  

This way I avoid getting sucked in an item which seems to have a large potential gross profit, but is only sold so often. 

Other than that I simply try to copy Croda's strategy by trading in low-volume, low supply and slowly moving items. Though I do this on a wayyyy smaller scale.

Alpha to Omega by regional trading - Milestone 1 reached after 11 days

Milestone

I reached the first milestone. 
Having a wealth of more than 1 billion ISK. 

What has happened the last couple of days

Due to a mistake I made while using the spreadsheet where I identify items to buy I double-bought some items. 

This led to the unfortunate situation that my inventory is way bigger - in terms of ISK - as I would like to have it.

My problem now is simply not having enough spare sell orders available as I'm restricted to a maximum of 17 sell orders per character.
There are some items currently contracted. For these items spare sell order slots are already waiting.
But for the items in inventory, I need to wait for existing sell orders to be fulfilled. Then I can clear my inventory and put it on sell orders.

Another challenge I face is that my wallet size grows faster than my opportunities to invest.
Sometimes only 1 or 2 sell orders per market hub are available for me to fill with new items.
As my wallet size increases so much, buying and selling items for 20 million ISK or below does not accomplish my goal of having as much ISK as possible invested in the market.

Strategy:

My current strategy is identifying items that trade at least every 2 days. 

They need to show at least a gross profit margin of 50% when comparing prices between Jita and the trade hub I plan to sell it. 
My third criteria is that the Buy price in Jita needs to be below the 60 day average price. This is simply to avoid getting sucked in a price bubble where I eventually might not able to sell the item with a profit or at all. 

To be able to invest my growing wallet size I will need to adjust some criteria. Either by reducing the required margin, or mabye by expanding the search to items that trade only every 3 or 4 days on average. 

I try to update my prices at least once a day. 
To avoid scrolling through all orders I copy/paste from my spreadsheet the names of items that need price updates and then I import them in the Quickbar. 

Items I trade

For the moment I sell few blueprints, and they are moving very slow.
Most of the items I sell successfully are implants and modules, mostly deadspace and faction modules.
Some of them have very little to no competition while others are showing 4 or more active sellers.

Next milestone: 3 billion ISK = equivalent to 500 Plex

If you'd like to try out Eve Online, please click my referral link. It gives you a million skill points and it helps my characters progress as well. Thank you.

Alpha to Omega by regional trading! - Month End Update - August 2025

It's been a week since I started this challenge. 

First impression: it makes fun, but I'll certainly need a long breath to reach my goals. 

I ran the numbers I've got so far, and as expected, the taxes and fees an alpha character has to pay are having a big negative impact on the overall performance.

During my first 7 days I made sales of 556 million ISK. 

After taxes and fees 20.5 million ISK remained as net profit, resulting in a net profit margin of around 3.7 %. 

My pre-tax margin was 19.8 %. 

This is way lower than expected given that I trade in items that are required to have at least a 50 % margin on the initial sell price in my target market compared to the price I pay in Jita.

This means I've had to adjust my initial sell price - on average - by 17 % before the item got sold. 

On top came sales tax of 7.14* %, contract rewards and broker fees. 

My base broker fee is 2.38 %. As my total broker fees were 6.91 % the fees I had to pay for updating orders were 4.53 %.

My contract rewards have been 2.06 % of sales value. As I pay 1 % reward on the collateral this could mean I charge a too high collateral. I'll have to check and examine that in more detail.

 

As write-offs due to price updates and high broker fees having such a big negative impact I need to increase the initial margin between the purchase price in Jita and the expected sell price from 50% up to 75% or even more.

In total though, my wealth rose from 67.5 million ISK to 88 million ISK within the first week, which is a plus of 30 %. It could be worse. :)

My current wealth is 423.5 million ISK which is made up from:

- Items for sale 562.2 million ISK

- less a 25% provision of 140.6 million ISK

- Inventory 1.6 million ISK

- ISK in wallet 0.3 million ISK

*Standard sales tax for alpha characters is 7.50 %. But for some transactions I did pay less taxes, all the way down to 5 %. Haven't figured out the reason yet.

(As I don't have a lot of (real-life) accounting skills, I do welcome any tips and suggestions where and how to improve the way I present my numbers here.)

An important lesson I 're-'learned today is to always leave enough spare ISK in the wallet to be able to post broker fees for necessary order updates. 

Alpha to Omega by regional trading! - Update after 5 days

Right before my first complete weekend I want to share the current status of my challenge.

Currently I have  16 sell orders active, 12 in Dodixie and 4 in Amarr.

My wallet allows me to reinvest the current 43 million ISK which I will do in Amarr.

An issue I run into is the frequency my courier contracts to Amarr are accepted.
As Amarr is almost 3x the number of jumps away from Jita than Dodixie, and because of my contract values (and therefore rewards) being quite low on a per jump basis, i need to post my courier contracts to Amarr more frequently before they get accepted.
I hope this will smooth out as soon as the contract values rise.
For this to happen I need to find items that I can buy with my current wallet size and be able to sell them for about 100 million ISK or more (in total).
I hope to be able to do this by the end of next week.

I created a list of about 150 items that show a 50%+ margin and trading reasonably often.
I don't trade in consumables, mostly implants, and modules. 

As mentioned before I calculate a 25% provision against my sell orders, and against my contracts as well.

Wealth at start of the challenge. 23.08.25

Current Wealth:

Let's see what the weekend brings...

Happy trading and manufacturing to you all!