One Year of Trading

From January/February 2013 to February/March 2014 my second character lived as a sort of hermit in low sec doing exploration and PI. As I describe in this post a while back, this was an incredibly formative and fun year (or so) of EVE for me, but it came to an end when I moved this character out of low sec and transitioned more into trading. I still do a lot of exploration, but causally—and sometimes even in high sec. Though I play EVE primarily to PVP, I live a double life in a way, also playing a character who avoids PVP at all costs, first as an explorer and now more so as a trader.

In August 2013 I started regional and inter-regional market trading. It has now been a full year of trading, and I would say I've come a long way. I started with a handful of goods and some T1 haulers, selling in small markets I had at some point lived in/around. I suppose the most significant milestone is my total profit on the year, half of which has come in the past three months:

First Year Total: 58b.

Monthly Isk in Millions

Looking ahead into the next year of trading, here are a number of things that have recently changed for me:

First of all, my goal has always been to trade on one character, with 300 stable (though constantly changing) orders. However, I recently took the plunge and trained a second character on that account. One month of training easily allows for a character with 125 market orders and two weeks of other skills as need be, and this character (or two) does not cost extra each month since it is on an existing account. The reason why I trained a second character is that it actually makes my trading more efficient and less time consuming while at the same time adding more orders. Here's why: As my posts introducing trading outline, one place I trade is Simela, a mission hub (more posts in this series hopefully coming soon). I trade all sorts of goods there. The orders do not need frequent updating and I only need to restock every week or two. So, I decided to split this market off onto a second character since it is so hands-off. It doesn't make a lot of isk, but enough to be worth keeping. With 125 orders freed up, my main trader can add more items to hubs that she visits more frequently. I should reach thi new goal of 425 orders by the end of the month.

Second, as my experiment involving investing 100b into the market outlines, once I am no longer using profit to add orders I will be investing most of my profit into long-term market orders—primarily simply to avoid having a lot of isk in my wallet (a bad thing given how frequently I often add zeros when putting up orders).

Third, I have stopped doing PI. I actually really enjoy PI. It is rewarding to build colonies that passively generate income, sort of like setting up a city in SimCity and seeing it run smoothly on its own. However, it was becoming too time consuming to travel to this remote low sec area and transport the goods.