Market Milestones - 10b in one month

The end of June brought to close another month of trading--my best month yet by leaps and bounds. In May I reached a record of 8b isk in profit, while in June I smashed that and made a little over10b isk, roughly 338m a day. Total number of orders stands at 250, and total sell order amount is at 47b isk. Here's what my income has looked like (in millions of isk) since I began tracking the data (exploration profit is averaged over three periods due to the vast fluctuation in profit, as described in my past posts about income in exploration):

I'm looking forward to what July will bring, as it will mark a full year of trading. I should reach a full 300 orders by the end of August, with sell orders around 60b given the items I plan to add to the market. After that--who knows! I likely won't add more trading characters, so my profits will likely be put into longer term investments. PLEX seems to be the common choice, but this sort of highly long-term trading will be a completely new world for me.

As I've described in previous posts, my trading methods are a little peculiar. Here are some of the distinctives:

• First and perhaps foremost, I trade on only one character. Many established traders (who, understandably, make many times more than I do) have numerous alts for trading, sometimes upwards of a few dozen characters dispersed throughout the trade hubs of New Eden. My goal for this trader is to reach and maintain a stable 300 sell orders and it is unlikely I will expand to more characters. This is partly because, as this very helpful post at MarketsforIsk explains, when you have only a finite and stable amount of play time, eventually your “Return on capital employed” will hit a wall. At that point, given that you cannot play for longer periods of time, you can find better trade hubs or better items to sell, but that's about it. For me, 300 items is close to my optimal number of orders, particularly since I am constantly changing hubs and changing items I'm selling based on trends and preferences etc. 
  
  
• I do my own shipping. Many traders—for good reason—contract their shipping to organizations like Red Frog. Transport adds a large time sink, as well as added risk since groups like CODE. have increasingly started targeting freighters regardless of content. I am partly helped here by the fact that I sometimes work at home and can do semi-mindless tasks like hauling without much interference. This character also functions as a casual explorer, occasional combat scanner/scout, and rarely as a link alt—she is spread quite thin currently.
  
• I update orders usually only a few times a week, and never more than once a day. 
  
  
• I buy straight from sell orders in major trade hubs or even locally. I hate updating orders and I hate buy orders, so I avoid both as much as I can. As a result...
  
  
• I don't aim at certain profit margins—such as 10-20 percent per item—but at movement relative to the margins. So, I sometimes make only 1-5 percent profit on items, which is fine if the items are moving.
  
  
• As my slowly progressing series on trading explains, I trade in fairly predictable items at fairly predictable locations—like trading ammo at mission hubs. EVE is a game which rewards knowledge, and many traders are by far the most knowledgeable players about the market trends in EVE, which they exploit for impressive profit. Me, I'm still pretty new, I don't know too much about the game compared to others, I don't speculate about the market, and I make a lot of mistakes. As a mostly solo PVPer and casual explorer, I simply sell the items I am familiar with, the sort of thing a month old character could do—and, to my surprise, it has worked for me. 
  
  
• I don't use spreadsheets to track my trading. I use EVE Profit and, I'm rather embarrassed to say, I simply jot down what I need to restock in a notepad document in the EVE client when items sell. Like many other peculiarities of my trading habits, this is largely due to keeping things as simple as possible—lest EVE start to feel like a job.