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!

Alpha to Omega by regional trading! - Update after 3 days

Start of the challenge: 23.08.25

Wealth after 3 days: 

• Wallet: 8 million ISK
• Inventory: 1 million ISK
• Sell orders: 143 million ISK
• Provision against sell orders (25%): -36 million ISK
• Open courier contracts: 98 million ISK
• Provision against contracts (25%): -25 million ISK
• Total: 189 million ISK

My main effort over the last couple of days was to improve my spreadsheets.

I created a list of items and I'm now able to filter directly for items that fit my requirements regarding gross profit margin, number of days where orders have been filled during a specific time frame and minimum gross profit in ISK. 
Still a lot to improve but it's working for now. 

To reflect the higher taxes and fees in my accounting I increased the provision against sell order value and contract value from 20% to 25%.
Taxes and fees have a much bigger impact for an alpha character in comparison to an omega character. 

-----------------------------

Goal short-term: Plexing the account by trading and having at least the same amount of ISK in wallet + sell orders that is required to instantly buy another 500 Plex (1 month Omega offer)

Goal mid-term: Plexing the account by trading and having least the same amount of ISK in wallet + sell orders that is required to instantly buy another 1200 Plex (3 month 20% Omega offer)

At current prices (5.8 million ISK per Plex) I need around 2,9 billion ISK to plex the account (short-term goal).
As my short-term goal is to plex the account AND having the same amount of ISK available (either in wallet or in sell orders) I need a wealth of 6 billion ISK with current Plex prices to reach my short-term goal.

Tools: The tools I will be using are the Eve Online Excel Add-in and Evetycoon.

The challenge is considered to be completed and will end when the mid-term goal is reached.

Alpha to Omega by regional trading!

Hi there,

inspired by Oz's videos about station trading and later on by Croda's blog about regional trading I tried both approaches.

I did the alpha-to-omega challenge doing station trading the way Oz describes in his videos and it worked very well.
Some time after that I switched to regional trading after seeing an interview with Croda in Oz' twitch show. I plexed my account doing regional trading as well.

What I have not tried yet was to start right away with regional trading as a complete fresh alpha character and trying to plex this account.

This blog is about my attempt to achieve that. 

Here are the rules and setup for this challenge:

• I will not send any money or Plex from my main account, so starting completely fresh.
• I use one account with 3 characters.
• A buyer in Jita, a seller in Dodixie, a seller in Amarr
• Limitation 1: Only 17 Sell Orders (max. for alpha) per character (34 in total = 2 x 17)
• Limitation 2: High sales tax (7,5) and broker fee (3%, reduced to 2,38% with skill 'broker relations') -> therefore I calculate with a minimum gross margin required of 50% for the initial sell price.
• Limitation 3: only 1 account
• Limitation 4: Play time per day max. 30 minutes

Goal short-term: Plexing the account by trading and having at least the same amount of ISK in wallet + sell orders that is required to instantly buy another 500 Plex (1 month Omega offer)

Goal mid-term: Plexing the account by trading and having least the same amount of ISK in wallet + sell orders that is required to instantly buy another 1200 Plex (3 month 20% Omega offer)

At current prices (5.8 million ISK per Plex) I need around 2,9 billion ISK to plex the account (short-term goal).
As my short-term goal is to plex the account AND having the same amount of ISK available (either in wallet or in sell orders) I need a wealth of 6 billion ISK with current Plex prices to reach my short-term goal.

Tools: The tools I will be using are the Eve Online Excel Add-in and Evetycoon.

The challenge is considered to be completed and will end when the mid-term goal is reached.

10 days every month I expect to not be online due to work, family, other real-life issues. So I expect to be able to achieve approx. 21 days active playing days per month.


First Steps I did before starting the challenge:

• Setting Up a fresh account with a referral link of my existing account
• Creating 3 characters (Caldari - Jita, Gallente -Dodixie, Amarr - Amarr)
• Doing all tutorial missions and all career agent missions in a starter area per character.
• Training up social skill and connection skill for better ISK rewards and standing for all chars
• Selling all items I collected during the career missions to buy orders in existing systems. (due to use time efficiently)
• Training all available trading skills, which - for alpha characters - are essentially only 'Trade' to level 3 and 'Broker Relations' to level 2. 
• Training corporation management on Jita character.
• Creating a corporation with 100% tax and LP rate to have a common wallet from which  trades are being done. Adding all 3 characters to this corporation.
• Placing each character in the respective trade hub.
  
• All ISK i gathered up until the start of the challenge came purely from rewards of starter missions, AIR career rewards, AIR daily goal rewards and the ISK I made from selling all items gathered throughout the starter missions. 

Start of the challenge: 23.08.25

Wealth at start: 

• Wallet: 67.million ISK
• Inventory: 8 million ISK
• Total: 75 million ISK

Wealth will be accounted by summarizing ISK in wallet, buy orders (should always be zero except for Plex), sell orders and outstanding contracts. I will deduct 20%  of sell order value as potential expenses for updating orders.

Strategy:

I will be buying to sell orders in Jita and putting up sell orders in Dodixie and Amarr.

Trading in low-volume, low-demand, high-margin items.

I don't want to haul myself, so I will be using public courier contracts right from the beginning

As my maximum combined number of sell orders (34) will probably be filled with items very quickly, the only way for me to scale up my wealth development is by bying higher priced items and selling them for at least the same margin as the lower priced ones. 

The skills relevant to Trading that i have are:

Accounting:
- not available to alpha characters, so my sales tax will be 7,50 %.

Broker Relations:
- Level 2; which is the maximum for alpha characters.
Meaning i am charged 2,38 % base broker fee to list an item for sale.
For every price change, whether up or down, i am charged xx % of the new  sales price

Trade:
- Level 3; which is the maximum for alpha characters, increasing the number of items i can list for sale by 4 per level to a total of 17.

Retail:
- not available to alpha characters

Marketing:
- Level 2; which is the maximum for alpha characters.
Allowing me to set up sell orders in stations other than the one i am in.
I won't use it as I only trade directly in the market hub.

Accounting:
- not available to alpha characters


Current Tax rates for my characters:

• Sales Tax rate: 7.50 %
• Broker Fee rate: 2.38 %

So let's get started and see where it ends …