Market Discussions

Hi folks. Some of you may remember me from before my hiatus; you're awesome. Some of you may not; for you, I'm a hisec industrialist that did a series of offerings here before getting a nifty job offer and taking a break from the game. (Here's my most recent offering, and that posting includes a history of my prior ones.)

I'm going to have a bit more spare time over the summer, and would like to use that time to re-establish and expand an industrial setup I can then maintain through the fall and beyond. To that end I'll likely be posting a loan offering here shortly (over the next week). Before I do that, though, I wanted to pick your collective brain on a few topics.

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1. It seems like interest rates haven't varied that much. (8%-10% for uncollateralized loans, 2%-4% for collateralized.) Is that accurate?


2. More broadly, how's MD doing, culturally speaking? Seems like there's been a lot of turnover. I see Jerry's still around, though, I look forward to him contributing 20B.


3. Have there been any serious, top-level mechanics changes I need to be aware of/avoid being blindsided by? This could be market changes or industrial changes. I noticed the increase of sales tax to 1.5%, for example.


4. Given that I am essentially rebooting my industry from scratch, this will be an opportunity to start my accounting from a clean slate. Anything I should do? (In particular, here I'm thinking of which offline tools you folks use to chart P&L, list sort and store journal transactions, that kind of thing.) I was a big fan of EWA's cashflow charts, but I'm not sure that's still running, and it never was really good at understanding manufacturing profit or keeping track of material stores.


5. This is going to be the controversial one. I'm figuring out how to structure the loan(s). Right now a big chunk of my wealth is tied up in very expensive, heavily-researched BPOs that actually aren't related to my main business. I view them (well, the business they enable) as a retirement plan. I'd like to use them as collateral in a loan so I can get working capital.

The problem is that, if memory serves, MD doesn't like valuing collateral BPOs above NPC prices, whereas these prints are trivially worth more than that. Using what I think is a pretty conservative model (valuing research time at 4% of BPO value per month, compounding, so roughly equivalent to what you'd get from selling it and loaning that money out risk-free), the research boosts the NPC 43B pool of BPOs to about 65B. This 4%-a-month valuation is borne out by recent BPO auctions on Sell Orders, and may even be too low. Worse-researched prints are getting higher prices.

If I value them at NPC as collateral, that's incentivizing my creditor 22B to walk with the prints. You see my dilemma. (There's also the issue that I'll end up paying more through uncollateralized rates on the difference, but that's a smaller matter.)

Anyone have any advice? I do acknowledge that creditors have an incentive to reduce the loan amount for a given collateral pool to make liquidation easier, faster, and safer, but taken to an extreme it incentivizes creditors to walk, and I'm pretty sure my case qualifies.


6. Related: if I do end up asking to value the BPO pool at higher than NPC, would-be creditors will quite rightly want to know what's in the pool. Are there any possible downsides to publicizing the print types + research levels like this? "Revealing secret sauce" doesn't really apply here, as it's not a terribly innovative business model. "Telling competitors who to knock out" and "telling pirates which haulers to track and gank" don't really apply either, as whenever I decide to pursue this business I'll do it with an anonymized alt pool.

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Thanks for your feedback. I did miss MD, you had a certain goodness under your prickly shell.

Here's what I'd do in your position.

Yes, undervalue your collateral. That relaxes the creditor and leads to lower rates. If they favor a default rather than fear it, obviously you will get better terms and friendlier service.

Because your collateral is undervalued, don't lend your stuff to a nobody. Luckily, there are dozens of players that have names valuable enough that they won't run off for a measly 10-100B in profit.

I used to deal with Raw23, but unfortunately he left the game. Grendell is good for absolutely any level and rarity of collateral, and I've taken out a couple loans from Blueprint Seller and can vouch for him at around the 100B level.

Lastly, avoid dealing with multiple creditors/investors. While it's tempting to set up a complex bond with shares, buybacks, etc, there's trillions of isk floating around the market. It's not hard to find someone that would happily let their extra isk make passive income, provided you provide healthy collateral.

Hello and welcome back!





1. It's accurate enough, but 2% for a collateralized loan is low. It became easier to "make ISK" so people won't bother with the hassle just to get 2%, unless it's someone like Grendell and similar.

2. Culturally speaking, imo MD is dormant. No real new stuff going around, no big investments that make you drool and similar.

3. Tiericide changed / is changing whole classes of ships and this caused a lot of minerals changes. Proposed roids composition changes (more trit in high ends and more). Ice belts removed and replaced with anomalies with 4h respawn timers.

4. I still use EWA / JEvEAssets / EvE Income analyzer

5. and 6. Like for every market, your collateral will be valued exactly for what's worth in the eyes of the investors.
BPOs are not aseptic and insulated entities, so it's impossible to properly evaluate their value without knowing what they are for and how much research they got.

I.e. I'd never buy a tiericide involved BPO right now as the market is still flooded by those BPOs off people who purchased thousands for the patch speculation. Can't sell on market so you have to endure some excruciating run to rebate sales on contracts. Other BPOs pertain to ships that are perceived as bad, thus if you have a well researched minmatar capital BPO you are not going to get the same appreciation than going Amarr. Other BPOs have super-tiny markets.

Collateral holders know these pitfalls and they value their time and value how long it takes to dispose of those BPOs. This heavily dents into the BPOs research added value. I have purchased ME 5 PE 2 capital BPOs for below NPC value, exactly because they were so nasty to sell that the owner just created a contract for below NPC value to get rid of them.

Now, if I had to take the loan, I would not give you 65B but probably not just 22B either.

Good luck with the loan keth.


As said in our convo a few days ago i don't do loans any more , basically as of this month i don't do anything any more iskwise as i am liquidising all my stuff wich is not suited for my nulltime, closing all the trade hubstuff and selling off the bpo's , time to finally make use of that retirement isk that got piled up over the last years.

But as said if you got a hardlife getting it filled you are allays free to open a new convo and i can see what i can do for old times sake.Though i doubt you'll have a hard life getting it filled if you are using collateral.These days non collateral rarely get's filled.

I don't agree about "unclaimed MD Elite" being here.

The MD Elite were a cast, closed in a sort of ivory tower, had ties between them, make opaque deals and offerings, talked the non MD Elites down.


Which of these factors are present here?

There was never any such thing as "MD Elite." There was, however, a group of people playing a really long game of musical chairs. No one "brought stability to MD." They just stopped playing the uncollateralized loan game.

Welcome back Kethas, always good to see familiar faces return!

EDIT: If you are looking for interest rates in the 2% range, it's worth talking to Tornsoul. For loans 50b+ he offers 0.5% a week interest on standard collateral. Personally I don't really offer anything below 3%, but I tend to be very flexible as to what can be used as collateral. So just some food for though!

After chewing it over a couple days I really can't see an added risk to publishing these. Here's my current BPO collection that I intend to use as collateral. Note that this actually doesn't include the prints I use in my current business models; this is the retirement plan.

I have:

4x Charon BPO
3x Obelisk BPO
5x Orca BPO
... and enough component BPOs to manufacture off all 12 with 100% uptime.

All are very, very well researched (e.g. ME 14 PE 3 for the freighters). Since I'm using them as collateral I figure I may as well shoot for perfect ME.

In any loan agreement I'd want to continue to research them while they're collateral. In my perfect world the creditor would have a tower and spare research slots on toons already available (and I would pay a premium for the service). If we end up with you locking down the prints in a corp and then me managing standings boosting, POS setup and management, research jobs, etc. that's fine too, and I have anonymized alts that could handle it.

Using a valuation model of 4% BPO price per month (what you'd get from selling the prints and handing out the cash in collateralized risk-free loans), I come to a sum value of about 64B. (I originally used an NPC price of 90% base value, instead of the post-patch 100%, and using that the number's around 57B.)

This model isn't necessarily accurate - a ME 600 Orca BPO is not more valuable (well, luxury factor aside) than a perfect-ME @ ME 6 one, for example - but it's largely borne out after a cursory scan of the Sell Orders forum and ingame contracts for comparable prints.. For example - and I swear this was not deliberate - I stumbled upon the following gem regarding ME 16 PE 3 Obelisk prints while vetting the valuations (note the author):


Here's a Google Docs with the print list, research levels, and math, so you can check for yourself. I haven't verified the numbers with a database pull since returning, and I also hastily fixed the NPC valuations from 90% to 100% as above, so I'd give everything a once-over before doing a deal based on these numbers.

With a quote of mine comes a response of mine


The freighter bpo's have gone down in pricetag per ME , where they did 300 m+ per ME they are now hoovering around 150 to 200 per ME.That's what you get when everyone jumps on the wagon .. archon price per ME sink will be next .However these quality ones you have indeed go for a VERRY nice price per ME.To top it off for you the npc price has gone up by about 200M per freighter bpo a month or so back in case you might not have noticed.

So yes , i still stand by the statement of a few months back that these they do go for at least double the npc price.I have sold an ME6 PE0 one this week for 3.3 B to give an idea for the curious ones.That is 1.3 B above npc for only 6 months of research while keth's charon bpo is 14 months of research.

Contracts be contracts so it is what the idiot pays for it ... if i where to sell an ME14 one i'd aim for 5 B at least.It would get sold at that price.

I wanted to give this loan a try but:

1) I see Blueprint Seller is nicely fitting to all the requirements while I'd have to pour in :effort: to free the research slots and I am a lazy (wo)man.

2) It's nice and cool to see a ME 5000 freighter BPO but on a collateral service point of view, there's a cost of business:

- risk of losing it (in case collateral needs moving i.e. to research it), all that research WILL completely violate the wallet in case I'd have to re-buy a BPO and research it for years and give it back as idemnification.

- it's like handling a Ferrari, as a tow trucker. It is like any other car, it weighs like a car, it is as large yet if I do something wrong or the loaner does something wrong, I am left a piece of super expensive wreckage in my hands.

- in case of fire sale (this mostly applies to IPOs though), investors - and in my case my liquidity providers - WILL demand it to be cashed in NAO. Guess what happens? You lose big time because to sell it fast you need to underprice it a lot.

I got some awesomely researched capital BPOs at below NPC price, I don't want to be the next guy dumping big price BPOs at below NPC cost. In this case I'd make back 22B and would lose the hugely massive difference on what I loaned.


Please notice, this is not intended to be a criticism on Kethas nor to any poster on this thread, it's just a "brain dump" of why I'd rather not take this loan even if I'd been the only one loaner in here.