Market Discussions

This day was today ... atleast for some people in the northern nullsec regions who only have access to Bistot/Crokite .

With current mineral prices in Jita, Scordite is now at 2nd place and more worth than Bistot.

So everyone grab your miners and start diggin. Ive heard that the Rokh makes up an excellent mining vessel in times of Hulkageddon

Interesting times, discuss ...

hidden belts say hi!

Scordite... it's the new chicken.

Miners aren't going to the market and looking at how much a particular ore is selling for (there are exceptions of course), they are determining the profitability of each particular ore in order to decide which ones to mine.

Miners value an ore in terms of ISK per cubic metre. This is because all other things being equal, a mining laser extracts a fixed volume of ore per cycle, regardless of the ore (rounded down to the nearest integer in terms of ore units). Thus you will go to the market, determine the value of minerals (e.g.: using lowest sell, or highest buy), plug those into your spreadsheet which then determines an ISK value per refining batch of an ore, and from there the ISK value of one cubic metre of that ore.

Now it just so happens that Tritanium and Pyerite are required in vast quantities, but are not abundant. The ores that carries them (typically, Veldspar and Scordite) are abundant in themselves, but huge volumes of these ores are required to satisfy the demand for those minerals. Thus it falls to the AFK hisec miners to mine those ores since you need thousands of laser-hours to produce the quantities required.

The low price of ABC reflects the relatively abundant supply of the minerals contained within (abundant compared to the demand for them, that demand being throttled by some other mineral in the respective mineral basket).

A mineral basket is a particular portion of various minerals, as required to manufacture stuff of interest. As a simple example, take the mineral basket represented by a Raven, and convert that to units of ore in which that mineral is most abundant, and then cubic metres of that ore:

• Tritanium 8,335,395 -> Veldspar (2,775,686) -> 277,569m3
• Pyerite 2,084,282 -> Scordite (1,668,428) -> 250,264m3
• Mexallon 522,143 -> Plagioclase (679,192) -> 237,717m3
• Isogen 130,371 -> Omber (212,330) -> 127,398m3
• Nocxium 32,555 -> Hemorphite (38,390) -> 115,170m3
• Zydrine 7,766 -> Crokite (2929) -> 46,864m3
• Megacyte 2,479 -> Arkonor (1500) -> 24,000m3

Now assuming a moderately skilled, boosted Hulk pilot, you are looking at about 100k m3/hrof ore extraction. Thus to build a Raven you need about 11 hours of mining from a moderately skilled Hulk pilot in a fleet with a mining director.

The story gets a bit more complicated though, since most of these ores bear multiple minerals (Veldspar is the only exception). Thus in the process of mining the 2M Pyerite, one will also extract about 4M Tritanium (and extracting the Mexallon from Plagioclse will contribute another 0.5M Tritanium, extracting the Isogen will produce another 130k Tritanium, and so on). Thus Scordite is the bottleneck due to being the largest quantity of ore to be extracted.

Note that a large volume of Mexallon is generated by miners attempting to extract Nocxium from Pyroxeres in hisec. If the Nocxium for the raven was supplied entirely by hisec Pyrox miners, about 355k of Mexallon would be sourced from Pyrox too, reducing the quantity of Plagioclase required to 217k units, or about 76k m3.

So with the revised ore requirements based on a very simplistic mineral basket for a Raven, here's where we stand with the amount of ore required:

• Tritanium 8,335,395 -> Veldspar (1.2M) -> 120,000 m3
• Pyerite 2,084,282 -> Scordite (1,668,428) -> 250,264 m3
• Mexallon 522,143 -> Plagioclase (217k) -> 76,000 m3
• Isogen 130,371 -> Omber (212,330) -> 127,398 m3
• Nocxium 32,555 -> Pyroxeres (985,528) -> 295,659 m3
• Zydrine 7,766 -> Crokite (2929) -> 46,864 m3
• Megacyte 2,479 -> Arkonor (1500) -> 24,000 m3

Now the catch is that Nocxium is flooded due to speculation before Escalation/Inferno, and there's a lot of hand-waving associated with various ores here and there. The take-home message is simply this: of all the ores required to be mined to supply the materials for a Raven, one bottleneck is Pyroxeres (assuming all the Nocxium is supplied from hisec miners), but that bottleneck is easily evaded by relying on imports from null sec, low sec or w-space. The other bottleneck is Pyerite which comes from Scordite, which no null sec or w-space miner is going to touch because "ewww, hisec ore."

Out there in null sec, there are miners who aren't drawing up spreadsheets of ISK/m3 because "everybody knows" that ABC are the ores to mine in null. So everyone mines ABC. They have been relying on ABC being profitable for so long that they have never bothered to ask the simple question of, "which ore is most profitable right now".

Right now, the universe needs about twice as much Scordite to be mined as any other ore. The way the economy signals this need is by allowing higher value buy orders to go unfilled, which means the buy orders get higher in value, which means the price of Pyerite rises until people drop their Kernite/ABC habit and start mining Scordite because it's worth more than any other ore except Arkonor.

There are certain to be complicating factors here: for example people with stockpiles of drone poo trying to sell off what they have because its value has dropped and they don't want to be left holding worthless stock. There are people with enough ISK in their wallets that it is conceivable that they are manipulating the Pyerite market.

To those of us who are not part of the inner circle of mineral market manipulation cartels, the signals are quite clear: mine Scordite. Close behind Scordite (in hisec) are Veldspar, Plagioclase and Pyroxeres.

In the end, miners value ores in terms of ISK/m3, not because they are buying and selling unrefined ore but because they are trying to maximise their ISK/hr.

That it is being artificially manipulated is even more reason to mine Scordite. Leave some poor suckers with stockpiles of Pyerite that they will not be able to clear for decades.

Pyerite (and all low ends, in fact) are driven by a huge lack of supply and I have no reason to believe that their massive supply issues will have changed in the three weeks since I've been able to revise my estimates.

And yet trit keeps pushing higher and higher. So much for "up to its eyeballs in veld", huh?

Interesting analysis!

I remember that scordite ore was last desirable type, mining veld was better. So how come scordite is beating veld now consumption changes?

but over the last week pyerite has gone up much faster than the other low-ends, surely them all going up is inevitable but why the sudden jump in pyerite?

I think Veld is better to mine in high-sec than Scord. The reason is simply that there's more and the rocks are larger. Last week I totally deleted around 4 high-sec belts. The rocks that last longest and produced in the end the biggest profit were all Veldspar. When people do these ISK/H calculations there's so much they *don't* take into account, like the time spent targeting the next rock, or moving to a new field when you've exhausted the existing one.