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.