Arnon and Peccanouette

It's been a long time since I had been to Arnon. However; in the course of the mineral market taking a downward swing, my bid to buy minerals in Essense region reached Arnon and the surrounding systems in the constellation Peccanouette. I flew over there in my freighter to pick up the massive amounts of minerals that quickly accumulated. I was amazed at how much the place has grown since the days I built up the mineral market there.

When I began my career as a miner I lived in the Peccanouette constellation mining plagioclase, omber, scordite and veldspar, but mostly plagioclase. I quickly learned that bringing your minerals to Oursulaert was much more profitable than selling to the nastily cheap bids to be found out here on the far edge of the region. Another thing quickly learned was that a hauler full of tritanium and/or pyerite didn't get you a whole lot of extra money and it made more fiscal sense to just dump your cheap minerals on the market where ever you were so you could fill up on more Mexellon and Isogen. Since I soon got bored of mining on my own, only getting into large mining operations on a rare occasion with my friends, I tried something different.

I started buying the tritanium that people didn't want to haul to Oursulaert and carried it for them. Some people still hauled their own tritanium when the price was really bad, but if I offered a fair bid at about 30 cents less than the bids in Oursulaert, people were more than happy to sell it to me. I was giving them a fair and much better price and there was enough margin to operate profitably. I soon began working in both directions, carrying at first mining crystals, and then mining modules and mining frigates and finally mining barges, exhumers and strip miners.

I started talking to miners in the newbie systems and invited other veteran miners out to Peccanouette to reap the benefit of a cluster of good mining systems plus a mineral market and mining supply chain right there in place right where you are. I soon found in my Iteron Mark V, that I couldn't haul enough to keep up with business. I was running back and forth constantly between Peccanouette and Oursulaert and inventory grew faster than I could move it, but so was my net worth climbing as well, and one at a time I fitted rigs to my Iteron Mark V until I maxed out what it could carry.

I finally bought my Obelisk, and steam rolled Peccanouette and built it into a really nice marketplace, and the best part was i was making enough to stay ingame strictly by buying GTCs with isk to pay for my subscription. I was in a great position to keep the competition out, and I learned market warfare and all that stuff that makes life easy for me but hard for the other guy. Things like artificially raising prices letting the others penny me and each other up, then going ahead and dumping my inventory on them for a profit without having to haul it anywhere, and setting the market back where I wanted it.

Seeing my project grow from something I created to support my own habit, into becoming the central mineral market serving three regions really tugs at my emotions and pulls out the best salty carebears tears...tears of pride.

Anyway, why am I telling you this again? Because oh my god, the tiny mining hub and mineral market I created has grown to colosal proportions. It's the mineral equivelent of Oursulaert, not quite as big but pretty close focused on stripping all mineral resources of Peccanouette. And...everyone, everyone, everyone, my corp, my mining associates, and traders alike...all of them thought I was crazy to haul tritanium, and it made me a multi-billionaire. Today, people are now calling me crazy for turning efforts to low sec, and say I can't possibly create a market hub in low sec. I am now done focusing on one region's low sec and beginning to branch out into a second region of low sec. What do you think?




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Don't try this at home!!!

You know, i am a pretty good guy and I try to share a market with people. There is usually plenty of buyers and sellers to go around. I try to take my turn when it comes to buying and selling stuff, and let the other guys get their buys and sales in too.

Well there is always one apple that spoils the barrel for everyone. I had a region-wide buy order for megacyte at a reasonable price and for not so much in quantity that I was being abusive to other traders. Another trader came in an upped me a penny, ok that's fine I'll wait my turn. When my turn came, he placed a new 100,000 unit buy order for 1,000 ISK per unit higher than everyone else. I guess he decided he needed the minerals more than the rest of us. Or perhaps he was trying to discourage the rest of us.

It ended up being ok, because I happened to have 100,000 units of megacyte which I happily supplied for him. I hope he appreciates how quickly he was accommodated.

All is well that ends well.

Trade Wars

Well lots has gone on since I last posted.

I found myself taking an unexpected vacation for three weeks. Something happened to my communications modules, and I was unable to get information or interact with the market or any other spacer activities. Ce la Vie. Before this, everything was running pretty much business as usual. I expanded my markets to include some of the higher end minerals and was hauling several loads of minerals a day.

When I lost communications, I was stuck waiting for everything to be repaired and come back online while I was stuck drifting aimlessly. When I came back online, I found my trade routes highjacked and in control of my competition.

So begins the trade wars. You lucky miners. The price for minerals has gone up tremendously since I started the trade wars. At some points in time the price for minerals at mining outposts has exceeded the price offered for minerals at the trade hubs. Not the best situation for a trader of any level, however I didn't let that stop me. Eventually things started to settle out and the prices offered at trade hubs were increasing since the supply was dwindling. No one is going to sell minerals for less than they pay for them, and I am no different. I may take a small hit in percentage and allowing myself to just break even to continue the trade war and regain control over my regions, but I won't sell my self short.

Instead I got sneaky. In the old world market place, this would be considered illegal, it would be considered market manipulation. Here is how it works. Because I am trying to regain the market place, I increase my buy orders. However, instead of my competitors letting me do so, they are also raising their prices. As I mentioned earlier, eventually the average price for minerals at the mineral outposts was exceeding the highest prices offered at the trade hubs. I can find orders FAR out, but as you know running REALLY long trade runs is a major loss in productivity. I give up trying to beat them out, and I sit wondering for a few days how I can work this out. Then it dawns on me. Each time my competitor raises their prices, they are now offering to buy minerals for MORE than I paid for them. Hmmm. I can sell them my minerals without moving them anywhere. The profit isn't as high, and I still have to pay taxes and brokers fees for the transactions, but I am not loosing any money. I also realize I can buy minerals cheaper at the trade hubs than I can at the outposts. Couple that with a couple of good buy orders in adject low sec systems, and I find myself in a profitable situation again. I am now running minerlas TO the mining outposts at a profit.

So lets run this again. Since my competitors will NOT let me regain my systems, I keep THEIR prices high by competiting with them for buy orders. While their prices continuous are raised higher than mine, I sell them the minerals I would otherwise have brought to the trade hubs. So they are paying MORE for MY minerals, because THEY keep wanting to raise the prices. Hey they may be making a profit, or maybe not. I don't know I don't care, but they are by the very nature of the beast, by their very competition have given me an opportunity to exploit them and profit myself. As it turns out with quite a bit less work also.

I have also started buying minerals in lowsec. Not far into lowsec, just one jump in on those border systems where low sec status pilots try to sell their goods because they can't come directly into high sec. I can get minerals a lot cheaper there for sure, and when things get hard like I have described here, it can help boost those lost profits.

Its risky running into low sec, but I don't do it stupidly. I make sure the system is safe to enter before I enter, and I get out as fast as I can. And I run when someone shows up in the local channel. No need to court disaster. I have even considered purchasing a second freighter, so that if I must temporarily abondon a freighter docked in low sec, I still have a freighter in high sec for continued normal use. It's still risky, remember I never said there wasn't a risk. You however just need to not be stupid about it.

So I have learned something here, I have learned how to conduct a trade war successfully. I don't even think my competitors have a clue what's going on either. Though they may, and they may not care. And I may quite possibly be letting the cat out of the bag here, but that's a whole nother thing entirely.

Where's the ISK?

After some toying around and paying attention to the mineral markets, I have determined that the cause of my new competition is literally caused by the removal of government subsidized ship markets (aka NPC shuttles). Because of all the speculation and movement in price of minerals, more people are speculating that the value of minerals will increase, and continue to increase.

I on the otherhand am operating normally, buying and selling. I am not sitting on stockpiles any longer than is required to get out to my systems which have minerals waiting for me. My immediate margins may not be astronomical at the moment, but the fact that I continue to operate normally and have many times more trades within a given period of time, I am certain I make making a lot more money than the speculators of similar net worth. Obviously if on has trillions of isk tied up in tritanium, a single sale can net a lot of money which I cannot compete with. At the same time, however, it isn't easy to sell that much tritanium at once unless you have buyers ready. Those people who are sitting on one or a few hundred million units of tritanium are definately behind the ball compared to my income which is rather significant and regular and perhaps most importantly, I can depend on it.

I similarly to Ka Jolo, a low-sec pirate who blogs at http://eve-pirate.blogspot.com/, am a young trader still learning the ropes but doing pretty well in the process. I estimate on my average days that I am still making about forty million ISK an hour of actual work. I do not mean that I make this money while I am offline, though my operation does continue while I am offline because people are selling to me ever few minutes of every day. However, it takes me approximately 1 hour to work a full load of minerals, and I can run at least one load a day, usually 3 or 4 loads. Over the weekends when I can spend more time babysitting the market and running my freighter to and fro between many end points, I can get in 5 or 6 full runs.

This Sunday however was abysmal. I was lucky to get two partial loads all day. Now I don't like to run partial loads, but I had buy orders ready to fail if I don't have the ISK to back them up. I needed to make those runs to make sure my wallet can cover the big trades so I don't loose money to my less deserving competetors. I don't actually loose money, but I do loose the profit.

Three days ago, I set up a public chat channel called "Interstellar Tritanium". It is my corp's public channel, however it is an open channel which I will use to keep in touch with friends I wouldn't otherwise be able to keep, and also as a place for local (meaning within the regions of my reach), miners and mineral traders to chat together in a place where we all have common interests and activities. I have connected with around 10 old friends so far, and made a few more.

Market getting tighter

Because I started mineral trading on the large scale only about 2 weeks ago, I am not really certain about the source of this effect in my area; however, the markets in my regions of operation have been getting a little tougher.



First, although I have been trading around two of these regions for a couple of months, I have not been much of a moving force. I have farmed more miners in the some of these areas by providing local places to sell their minerals for a fair price, but nothing compares to the power of a freighter when it comes to the ability to more minerals to mineral trade hubs.



I believe though I have literally created furtile ground for my own competition. You see traders review the activity of their regions when they place buys and sells. You can tell which systems have active trading even if you don't "log" that activity. You can tell because of pricing and volume. In places where minerals move a lot, and where there is competition, the buy price and the sell price of your product will be very close to one another and the majority of buy orders will tend to be larger.



Let me try to explain how I might have affected this.



In an Industrial Ship, you have the means to place buys and move minerals to the order of 5 to 10 million units in productive mining systems without locking your assets up. Larger orders will get you stuck with tons of minerals that need hauling and no money, anything less and you are running around a aweful lot just to fill the cargo hold of your Industrial Ship. This size of buy orders doesn't draw very much attention in the active systems, because they generally get filled in a couple of hours or less. There is some safety in this. Being a small time buyer means that the big boys aren't worried about you nor your short term competition. Their larger orders will still get filled once your small order is done getting filled. Since most pilots can't baby-sit the market for much more than a couple hours each day, the hit they take is tiny. In productive systems, your order lasts 2 to 4 hours maybe, which literally means you are not interfering with the big boys' trading for at least 20 hours of that day. Ultimately, the big boys don't even register your existence.



In a freighter, you have the means to move greater than 80 million units of minerals in one load. Generally speaking, unless you have gobs of money. You don't want to let eiter your money or your mineral assets go stale. Stale assets do not make you any money, they just sit there going stale and moldy. So you want to size your buy orders just right, in each highly productive system I work in, I place buy orders hovering around this 80 million unit mark. Instead of placing giant buy orders in one system and waiting for it to get filled over a period of days, I place my buy orders so that I will hopefully have at least one or two full freighter fulls of minerals to carry to the mineral trade hubs. Keep in mind that a freighter is an awesome tool because of the size of its hold, but these ships moves very very slowly. It moves a lot slower than even the largest Industrial Ships. Flying around gathering minerals from all across the region and making stops at stations along my routes is a lengthy process. I try to streamline this process so I am going point-to-point without making several stops, and this helps increase my productivity. There is a tradeoff however.



Larger buy orders take much longer to get filled. In a perfect world with zero competition, my buy orders get filled in 4 or 6 or more hours in those same productive systems. Sounds great until you realize that other traders become more aware of my activities. I have more and more often discovered that my buy orders have only been filled incrementally, and when I take a peek at the market, their orders beat mine for price. Of course my miners have no loyalty, especially since they don't even know they are working for me. They sell their mineral to whomever offers the best price. I wouldn't ask them to do otherwise, but now because my buy orders are larger and last longer, I am running into competition with the other big boys, boys who are much much bigger than me.



Now scenario number two. Maybe more traders are excited about stockpiling minerals since the governments are no longer subsidizing fixed price ship sales (most notably shuttles) which essentially has placed a soft cap on the price of the low end minerals. Since traders can no longer buy thousands of these ships and melt them down into their mineral components, there is no longer anything which artificially holds the price of minerals to a limited range. These traders are banking on the value of minerals to skyrocket, even if only in the short term.



Then again, maybe the problem is both. Big traders trying to get their hands on lots of minerals, and my providing a roadblock to overcome in my regions and they having to continually beat my buys to get a hold of as much product as they can and bank it for later. I don't work that way, I continue to operate normally and I don't invest in long term commodities. I buy and I sell and I move and I provide. This is how I operate, but the extra competition is making the margin a little skinnier than it was just a week ago.