Market Discussions

I am all for it however, there are some standards of financial reporting that must be used in order to establish ratio comparability cross company.

For example, are training skill books used to advance your character for manufacturing or trading should these be expensed by a corporation or booked to an asset account? Should inventory be evaluated using the FIFO or LIFO method?

Can revenue be recognized before cash is received? If a trader buys a ship to transport goods is the ship considered an asset if so can it be depreciated? How are ship losses treated?

How can we verify that the accuracy of the financial report?

These are just a few issues I have been thinking of. Again I am all for comparing companies across several industries, however the logistics and semantics behind this could be more trouble than it is worth. However, if a universal financial reporting guide was published companies could follow this as a basis for preparing their financial reports. We could even make a board to discuss accounting and financial reporting issues.

sounds like alot of work, as a CEO of a manufactureing corp. i dont count my revenue till after cash is recieved. i even do monthly audits for people who privately bought my shares. if i were to go public with shares. posting my PM and ROI to you guys might help a bit.

Well, like I said in my OP, this does not solely apply to publicly traded corps.

The idea is to get a good number of corporations which are famous in their area of operation (related to market and producing activities) and who would be willing to submit their financial data for this exercise.

This would also allow future bond makers to use the indexes as a reference to what they're looking to become if they're serious about it and that would allow for maybe more precise projected earnings and projected results to present to potential bond investors.

Edit : Well after reading your edit, I have decided I will simply ignore your posts from now on. I don't even know you but you sound like a down right ass. This is merely a discussion, an attempt to find other people who might be interested in this, and in participating in it. If you have a problem with the whole thing and it seems irrelevant to you, considering this does not incure any costs and I'm not requesting any kind of bond or investment, you might as well stay out of the thread.

It's that clear and that simple.

I kinda like the idea, the trick, as already noted, being to find a reporting method which is comparable.

In terms of how useful it'll actually be I'm not sure; as an indicator of typical profit figures to point at when folks come asking for investment claiming they can make billions a day by making X maybe - though such occasions are perhaps rare in so far as investees are rarely specific on the details and there are few sectors which can't easily cover a typical bond interest rate.

The other problem is that these new forums don't support the code block tags that the old ones did, making display of large amounts of tabular data hard.

But this is a forum with, almost by definition, a large number of afficiandos of spreadsheet pron - and who doesn't love a good spreadsheet?

Accuracy is another issue, but one that is liveable with so long as weak areas are highlighted. As an example, my history recording for my own purposes enters broker/sales fees in as a calculated product of the sale price - ignoring the fact that I may have listed a product at (eg) 840m (and paid a brokers fee on such) but sold later at 830m - now I'm calculating a brokers fee based on an 830m sale whereas in reality I paid one for an 840m sale. Similarly I use Jita sell price as my input for mineral costs recorded in history but in reality I'll source via buy orders, or occasionally outside of Jita - the extra trading isk made is unrecorded bonus magic isk.


For T1 manufacturing (I think the split should be at T1/above T1 rather than ships v/modules as the latter has to account for research slot opportunity costs too) my preferred metric is "Profit per Slot per Day". The other metric I've started recording for my own operations (and thanks due to Atima here in highlighting it during my bond thread in the summer) is "Rolling 30 day profit against capital investment" - this being a 30day extrapolation of profit as a percentage of the capital investment required to start and run the operation. The latter metric in particular is open to many vague guestimates, the value of a researched BPO for example, and whether one or two cycles of mineral tie up is included.

Anyhow, I've been recording my freighter sales since inception as a 1 freighter per 12 days operation in August to the (still very much small fry) 3 freighters per 12 days deal it is today.

• My profit per slot per day has varied between 3.07m down to a mere 843k (recent mineral basket upswing, significant lag in freighter prices - translation buy some cut price freighters you cheapskates) with a mean average of 2.2m per slot per day.
• My rolling 30 day profit against capital has varied between 5.87% and 1.59% (same reason for dramatic low as above) with a mean average of 4.3% on what is currently a 15.9b capital investment.

This is why I'm not concerned that being completely open about my operations will cause me to suffer increased competition :o)