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