April '24 Review

  April Opening Statement  

    The time I've had in April to dedicate to sitting down and looking through and updating orders was a little more limited than what I had originally thought I was going to have, however, I still did find some time at least once or twice a week to come through and look at things to day trade and make a few ISK on top for the trouble.

    As I had stated, I have decided to focus on the Amarr trade hub as I don't have time with real-life - life and a job to dedicate to micromanaging the orders in a larger hub like Jita, so I've decided to focus on consumables such as charges, ammo, drones, and the like. The margins aren't huge, especially with the limited skills of an Alpha character. Still, I have managed to turn a small profit with somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 - 10 minutes of looking at items to get into and updating any open orders I have, this is probably happening in a good week at a rate of 2 or 3 times a week. I am playing with some very small numbers in the pool as well so I haven't really faced any issues turning the product within the same day I've placed a buy order or sell order, it's been fun starting from nearly scratch to where I'm at now, it's not nearly as much as I wanted after two weeks of goofing around, but it's certainly progress!

    I do want to call attention to the Capsuleer Day XXI sign-in gifts that CCP is currently running, looking through there are some pretty good items in there like skill points to really jump-start someone and get more Gnosis and the Society of Conscious Thought ships out in the environment for the Omega tree. This should affect the prices of the ships and will bring them down, I know the Gnosis is used pretty regularly in ganking so might be making it a little more affordable so might continue to see the activity continue to pick up steam. 

Asset and Profit Analysis

    Starting asset levels for this experiment as stated in the previous article was $0.00 - starting from scratch, if went through a few of the starter missions and got bored pretty quickly and decided to trade the venture I got as a mission reward in for some seed capital, please see the image for the starting value of the character from when I started my trading experiment. 

    So - working with the roughly $1.6m in ISK, and through attempting to move high volume low margin items I've seen small increases in the net worth of the character, I'm not sitting on inventory long enough to be negatively affected by any price changes so I feel pretty comfortable not getting stuck holding the bag on any corrections, I also feel like I'm trading in items that are going to see massive changes in price one direction or the other as the markets are pretty established with enough inventory on either side to maintain stock based on average volumes over the last 30 - 90 days.

    Profits for the month aren't great overall as the seed capital was so small to start with, so the starting net worth came in at $1.6m, and the ending cash balance was $7.1m, inventory comes in at $667k for a total net worth to end the month of $7.8m, a change of $6.2m, from 2 weeks prior. Not a huge number, but nearly a 5x of the starting net worth, based on about 20 - 30 minutes of play time a week, I feel like fairly solid results. As the capital has increased the rate of return should continue to increase but until the market is saturated on the small items I'm moving and will need to find other high volume, okay margin items, but for now it's doing the trick. 

Month End numbers in excel form:

    I'm looking to increase my play time to about 15 - 30 minutes a day to attempt to capture a little more of the market activity, this should be achievable now that real-life work has begun to slow down a little, aiming for at least another 5x of net worth by the end of May.