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!

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 …