Market Discussions

How bad have t2 bpos become? <1% a month I assume?

There might be a way but I am not going to discuss it in public. A functioning small demo of it is already running since a while.

This might be cheating somewhat but I could get 10%+ returns a month out of a trillion isk.

How:

1) Take 100bil and run a business plan that returns 100% per month (labour intensive and boring but I have done it in the past).

2) Leave the other 900bil in the wallet (or bump the return slightly with a BPO farm etc).

At 10 trillion this would reduce to 1-2% per month depending on what's being done with the other 9.9 trillion.

The basic point is that the high returns you can get on smaller amounts can bulk out the limited returns from the excess, so a good starting buffer will support an average of 1% across a very large amount earning less than 1%. That will make the amount that a 1% average can be squeezed out of dependent on time availability for squeezing the maximum out of the smaller amount.

Another way of thinking about it is to ask what is the maximum isk (not %) return you could get from running all time-viable business and then work out how much you could have doing nothing before the total return falls under 1%. So, time is going to be the constraining factor, as there are lots of high return things you can do with smaller amounts that would balance doing nothing with the bigger amounts.

You could do it for years without going insane but it would feel like a psychologically unrewarding full-time job. How long you could stomach it is really dependent on what stage the isk becomes meaningless to you.

As to maxing things out, with a team to split the tasks I have a sufficient library of business plans to churn out at least 250bil a month if they were all fully funded. That would take a lot of people grinding the plans, though, and probably something like a trillion or more in actively used capital but would sustain 1% on 25tril. If you expand the labour base I could probably find another 250bil of opportunities in a week or two but I'm not sure you would want to go down this road as you could, with enough time/labour, take a 10% slice of every trade and manufacturing opportunity in the game (or more depending on what % of the eve population you enslave to your nefarious scheme ). God knows what that would return, but quite a lot I suspect. I might be best to ask the question within a fixed framework of time expenditure.

Edit -Rgr. was posting when you replied.

Yeah, one guy could manage that. But let's add your Titan BPC farm as well, as that could be run concurrently by the same person, for 125bil profit total or 1% on 12.5 trillion.

The most I've ever heard someone claim to be able to earn a month was 168bil but I can't speak to the truth of it. It was on a large scale manufacturing operation, so I assume that the invested capital would be under 10 trillion.

Edit - You could also concurrently run a supercap manufacturing business of at least some extent but while I made the plans for that I never got round to trying them, so I don't know realistically how big you could go on that without overstepping the time limit. That would also have considerable risks re: the safety of your building space, which might make it unattractive.

Heh - none taken. I was running this business with the single workload distributed over a three-man corp when VV audited me about a year ago (I collected a quarter of the profit for c. 1-1.5 hours work a day ). I'm not sure if she looked into the corp business in detail or not because the audit was of me as an individual but she might be able to offer some verification. I've also licensed out the plan a few times but I don't think any of the licensees ever got up to the full potential heights (and the current licensee might not want his name mentioned in case he becomes a target).

Now, it's hard to say too much without giving the game away but the overall plan is an integrated and optimally efficient trade/manufacturing business (buying mats from buy orders, building, selling the finished product on sell orders, all within highsec). It is the efficiency that really pays off, so it is not so much the market niches (which are quite numerous) that are at issue, so much as very, very fast turnaround combined with absolutely minimal time and resource wastage. The efficiency is the ultimate problem, though, because once you have that maxed out there is absolutely nothing left of interest to do (except occassionally rotating product lines). At that point it is just a case of rinse and repeat, day after day after day. So I had enormous fun building the system but got very little satisfaction from running it as I don't actually do anything with my isk other than try to make more isk and most other isk-making schemes (bar the supercap production) seem superfluous now (although I would very much like to know a bit more about the claimed 168bil/month plan!).

I'm not really sure what more I can safely say ... the first 50bil of capital and the first half of the time used earns about 75-80% of the profits; the plan involves building less than 200 different item types per day; best to be as close to Jita as possible ... but I'm not sure I can say too much that will offer any real confirmation of my claim without running through the numbers publicly (which I will do if my licensee ever stops stumping up my cut ).

Edit - Should the current licensing agreement come to an end I'll offer you first refusal on purchase of the plan if you like. You can scope it out and check the numbers before paying me of course.

The problem is the market isn't big enough to make this easy. You could probably sink it into commodities over the course of several months without distorting the market way up and losing isk. Then you could slowly sell back over the course of several months. Assuming general inflation continues then that would be a sure way. As for what those commodities actually would be I guess it would have to be as many of them as possible and whichever have the largest market, again so as not to create a bubble.

Course the only problem with this is the small isk traders out compete you in the .01 isk war so... idk honestly. Maybe giant contracts for high volume to get around the market? idk.

A trillion ... can hire a lot of mercs with that. Threaten people, extortion. Not my style, but wouldn't put it past someone in Eve.

As a reprehensibly lazy commodities trader for over a year and 100b in profits now I can confirm that it is not easy to get guaranteed returns, and it gets harder and harder as you try to pump more money in.

If we were just talking about methods where you could hypothetically inject huge sums of isk for profit, then yes. However, the challenge has been fleshed out to exclude activities that amount to a second full time job, where you really could be applying the same effort in real life and making real money.