Market Discussions

Interest received.

Additional 5B sent.

Confirm interest received and damn you Blueprint Seller - you beat me to it for the other 5 bil :(

All isk plus interest has been returned.

This has been an interesting period of trading, to say the least. I started on Saturday afternoon last week and more or less finished last night, so the period of activity was about 8.5 days. I still have a bunch of stuff slowly selling itself off, which will probably take a few days, but I won't be doing much active updating now.

The total profit for this period, once the remaining goods are sold, will be c. 28.15 billion.

I'm fairly happy with the end result but there have been some ups and downs, including a few very difficult days.

Saturday to Tuesday were very frustrating. When I had been casually pulsing the trade plan for three to four days every two weeks I was pleased with the results as I was hitting a billion or more a day for under two hours keyboard time. Given the results Rykker had previously achieved with the plan I was expecting to be able to hit something like 4bil a day now that I had the time to grind for a bit. However, after my first session of c. 10 hours I had only cleared around 2.3bil, so I wasn't very happy. The grind had been very hard but my isk per hour had dropped from 700mil plus right down to just over 200mil. I decided that I must be doing something wrong, so I tried a few innovations, such as focussing on the most profitable part of the basket, spending most of my time on 20 or so items and much less on the rest. Still no improvement, in fact things got a bit worse, and I was starting to feel burnt out after only two days.

I spent a lot of time trying to work out where I was going wrong. Up to this point I wasn't doing much in the way of controlling the markets, just going with the flow, so I decided that the missing link must be more active market manipulation. Well, that didn't work either and between my attempts at that route, for which funds were a bit too slim anyhow, and my focus on a small part of the basket, I was starting to get overloaded with stock of a few item types leaving me without the funds to trade properly in other areas.

Despondent, I decided to give myself a break and play Crusader Kings 2 to wind down for a bit. I was at the stage where I just couldn't face any more market updates and when I logged back in the next day I decided to just carry on a little light trade and turn to some industry instead. At least that was something I understood, while the trading was really getting the better of me. So day four was spent doing some quick market research for an indy project based on some stuff I had done in the past and just a little trading. I reckoned I could add a bil or two a day with the industrial stuff and maybe, if I could face more active trading again, push my daily total over 4bil that way.

Industrial goods started pouring forth on day five, with the healthy margins putting a smile back on my face. I kept up the light trading but decided to double my industrial output for day six (Thursday/Friday). That again looked good, so I doubled again for the weekend and when it looked like the whole weekend's worth would be finished by the end of Saturday, I put another batch in (half the size of the one I had thought would take me all the way through).

I was feeling much better by this point and my NAV calcs were telling me I would move over the 20bil profit line by the end of the weekend, so with a spring in my step I decided to have one last bash at trading (Sunday being the last day I had allocated to myself for grinding), This time I decided to avoid all my little innovations and stick rigorously to the plan Rykker had sketched. I really hammered the markets for an hour in the early afternoon, trying to make as many trades as possible. Checking my progress I found I was 600mil up! Going back for another session I got the same result.

A red mist descended as I realised the mistakes I had been making. It all came to me in a flash that the problem was not the goods I was trading (as I had rather ungraciously suggested to Rykker at my lowest point) but the general approach I was taking. Carefully considered approaches went out of the window, the classical music in the background was turned to hard rock, and caution was thrown to the wind. I started rampaging across the market segments like a barbarian horde, slashing and stabbing updates into the keyboard whilst grinning like a loon at the imagined dismay of my competitors. It may have been my imagination but it seemed as if things went a bit quiet in my markets as other people stopped trading, presumably waiting for things to ease up a bit. With the blood-lust running through my veins, I kept at it, watching the profits add up hour after hour. I had never really understood before the slight savagery that came over Rykker when he talked about the markets, assuming it was just a jokey way of presenting things. Now I got it. This was real market PvP, with each order filled a kill and each kill a loss for someone else. I got called away a few times and each time wondered if I would be able to get back into the same flow but there wasn't a problem. When midnight came and I did my final profit check, trading profits for the day were at just over 4.7 billion, not counting the further 2bil or so of industrial profits that day. I had carried out half a trillion isk of transactions, flipping 250 billion isk of goods.

Anyone who has spoken to me in the trade channels over the last week will have heard me whinging about how much I was hating trading and how I wanted a long break from it. That changed yesterday. Not only was it profitable but it also became, for the first time ever, fun! It will be another five or six weeks until I can do any more trading but I am positively salivating at the prospect.

Thanks to all the investors who have let me use their isk over the last ten weeks. I will have a new bond offering up some time in the second half of February and you guys will all have first refusal.

ISK received and thanks! Some good profits there and looks like you hit Zen! It truly is a fight and with the right system in place it's like bringing an A-bomb to a knife fight. .

Glad I could help my friend.