Market Milestones - 200b isk from Trade

My trade project keeps plugging along, making 18b in March on my two characters, and now has 10 straight months over 10b isk. The main milestone is that I've now made 200b isk total trading (the above chart does not include profit in April or a third character I briefly traded on in Thera). Since the late fall of 2014 I have stopped increasing the size of my markets (number of orders and locations) and instead have focused on optimizing the items I trade, optimizing how and when I restock, and especially optimizing the efficiency of my trading. So, even though I do not necessarily make more isk trading now than I did back in late 2014, I spend at least 200% less time on trading total per week than I did during the winter.

Since the fall of 2014 I have also stopped putting isk back into my trade hubs, and instead have turned to making long-term investments with the excess profit. At any given time, I often have only a few billion isk on all my characters. A while back, I did an experiment where I pretended to invest around 100b isk on the market, doing very little research, and would have made an estimated 12b isk from these investments in a few months. So, I've now turned toward long term investments of all sorts, following that model. I've been buying (and selling) more PLEX since even if it substantially drops in price I can use it for other purposes. I've also made a bunch of different investments in all sorts of items--a bit of everything except minerals and moon products, basically.

In terms of expenses, my two accounts are paid for about 6 months in advance. I still only lose/spend less than a billion isk per month, but I make at least that much isk causally from other sources--loot from destroying POS modules, LP when I am in faction war, and exploration sites here and there. Last month Sven lost 750m isk, the second most I've ever lost in a month, but the month prior I only lost 60m, and 156m before that, given that I am (still) primarily flying frigates, destroyers, and cruisers. I will eventually fly more expensive ships, but I am still working through many of the smaller tech 1 hulls in my goal to solo in every combat capable ship in game. This is all just to say that I trade primarily for higher-level sanctification it brings as a type of gameplay in EVE, rather than, say, to fund all of my activities. There might come a time when I still plat EVE but get tired of trading, but it takes so little and and effort at this point that I will likely continue for the foreseeable future. If there is ever another "PLEX for good" campaign, I will likely "cash out" all of my markets and investments and donate it there.