Market Discussions

First of all I have modest goals for my industry character and I am quite happy with my current isk/month for the current amount of effort I put in. I started out moving my own stuff to/from market but as the size and risk grew I started contracting it out. For a while I had a sweet deal with a corp member who had a freighter, but that fell apart. My manufacturing station is three systems away from Jita, or 4 warps depending on how you look at it.

My current cycle is 48 hours. I run 10 lines, have 10-15 lines worth of goods on the market and the materials for 10 lines queued up for next 48 hour window. If I push this to 72 hours then often the size of my goods is more than a freighter can hold, but more critically the value become more than 1 billion.

That means (for me anyway) that I have about 2.5 billion tied up in in goods and materials all the time. The issue I have been having is the unreliable nature of the big contract services. I have tried Push X (7.4 m/48 hrs) and Red Frog( 9 m/48 hrs) and public contracts for months and I am not happy with any of them. With Push X their worst case scenario is 6 days, with Red Frog it is 4. With public contracting the worst case scenario is.. never.

So what are my options? I could add two-three more "in motion" sets of jobs and start buying and shipping materials a week in advance of me actually needing them... that just ties up more capital. I could start paying for rush service at 27 mil per direction, but that is a lot of my profit. I could find a more reliable freight service (any suggestions?). I could buy my own freighter. At 1.3 bill I would break even in 144 round trips (288 days). Until I get ganked, then its a financial disaster.

Perhaps I could get more action on public contracts if I increased the reward? I have tried 3,4,5,6 and 7 mil rewards for the 3 jump trip at 400-500 K m3 at 700m to 1b collateral and most time I get no one to take it.

So what do you guys do? What would you suggest?

Thanks!

Public courier contracts.

I'm in an alliance that most haulers with a brain are at best nervous of interacting with, and I still get *enormous* amounts of things hauled at stupidly low prices.

Post them as 7 days till expiry but only 1 day to complete, and when you are capital constrained, pay higher than you normally would. (Example: I saw a good trade opportunity yesterday that tied up 2.2 billion of liquid ISK. I wanted that back ASAP, so instead of offering my usual 12-20m for a 2.5b collateral Orca load from Jita to Dodixie, I offered 30m and it was done faster).

I will probably get slated for this but I build in Jita. It has a high job cost but I don't have to haul any materials and that cuts huge amounts of time at a steep cost.

My objective is to reduce the amount of time I spend on industry / invention to an absolute minimum per day, something in the order of 5 - 10 minutes per character.

I do like industry but after a year or so I've moved towards a lower margin lower time invested simply to give me more time to do other things.

I'm not sure what the answer is to your transport problem, I sometimes use couriers as you can see from my contract history, but I tend to pay very well simply to get my stuff moved fast.

Building in Jita & still makes a profit.

this guy wins the thread!

Did you consider investing into a hauler alt?