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.