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:
- Using the mouse wheel to update prices if the price differences are small (see Croda's blog entry on this topic)
- 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.
- 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.
