Eve Rubicon: Investing and Speculating

Let's check out what interesting investments opportunities can be made for Eve Rubicon (Yes all I can think of is that darn Jeep model)

POCOs
POCO changes are going to be a big drive for conflict and will make pi production costs possibly shift down, I think as people shop for better tax rated POCOs, corps that raise their taxes will soon find their planets empty there is just to many choices. They will be hard to defend large amounts of planets expect smaller alliances to dominate pockets of regions. A smaller type of sov warfare for high sec and a way to generate some income a great change to the game. Expect fluctuations in PI products to level out several months after release.

A quick side note. Everyone is bemoaning the fact that the goons are just going to ROFL stomp all of the high sec POCOs and own all of them. My question to you is why would they want to?  Goons are a large null sec alliance they will be busy protecting their moon shiz out in null. If POCOs were the end all take all they would own all the low sec ones which they don't. Now will there be PI Interdictions you bet, probable be an annual event, but I doubt a full 2000 system POCO Goon Empire will emerge from this.

Now as far as investing in the Customs Office Gantry and building them, besides a slight up tick in prices at release I think they will stay stable. Remember in low and zero you can already blow these things up but no large market really exists for CO.
DevBlog: EVE Rubicon: Player Owned Customs Offices in Hi-Sec Make sure and read the fine print they are shifting PI tax rates and changing all sorts of stuff here.

Personal Deployable Structure
PDSs not a lot of information exists to give us a clear direction. Expect this to be a great build and a way to make lots of isk if you have the means to invest in such a large project. I am definitely going to keep my eye on it but I am into building stuff. Expect to need a freighter to move any large amount of these around. Effects on the market: moon prices will vary slightly around the fact that now pirates will be dumping plunder on to the market if the mechanic works right for the siphon unit.

Warp Speed
Hopefully with the work around the mechanic pushes freighters to be a little bit faster for those of us that do our own hauling. Exciting news and an all around great fix.

New SOE Ships
New ships are always nice though they will no doubt be bought using lp. Meaning mass production is out of the question. If you have a few billion isk this might be a fun place for speculating once patch goes live. It will probable be worth it for a couple months until the ships are common place.

Other Ship Changes
As far as investments goes interceptors were sold out within minutes of the announcement so unless you where on top of this one you could catch the tail end of the speculation here.

UI Changes
Other changes deal more with  UI aspects nothing here to really invest in. Although some of the skills are getting switched around a bit if you deal in the skill book market.
DevBlog: License to kill: Certificates Overhaul

My Investments
As for my own investments I think I am going to stick with what I have been doing. Working the implant market and building industrial ships. The Expansion really only means one thing increased player activity and that is all I want/need to move my market orders. Glad for the early release date Nov. 19, 2013.

Links and Updates in no particular order:

How to: A Trade Guide

I have gone through, step by step, my thinking process for trading products on the market in Eve Online. This is the basic break down of what goes through my mind when I trade or manufacturer something in Eve Online.

1. Research Phase
1. First I pick a product, Choose a buy station/(mauf. cost) and choose a sell station.
2. Go to the market window and check:
Buy station's product's:

• Cost overtime - Does the product general stay cheap to buy or make?
• Current orders -  Is there enough supply for you to buy from at that low cost?
• Volume overtime -  Are people resupplying?

Sell station's product

• Cost overtime -  Is it stable at a high price?
• Current orders - Is there low supply?
• Volume overtime - Does it sell?

3. Scrap it/ Watch it/ Go for it.

• Scrap it - If your asking yourself these questions and every time you say no just remove the item from your watch list.
• Watch it - Indicators aren't great but margins have been good in the past? Keep it on your watch list and wait for another day.
• Go for it - All indicators good overtime, it is time for a test phase.

2. Test Phase One - Low volume one week test phase.
1. Buy product/mauf. at supply station. I usually start my first order at one to five units worth of stock.
2. Set up test order with 5 units.
3. One week later check speed it sold. Quick sells are good, constant high 30% - 50% margins with no competition are best. Usually though you will see sold returns at about 10% margins. Time to move to the next test phase.

3. Test Phase Two - Higher volume one week test phase.
1. Buy product in larger amounts, 10 to 20 units as capital allows.
2. Set up test order with 20 units.
3. Check day to day over a week.

• Do you get undercut a lot? Yes or No
• Does it sell quickly(Relatively small amount of time between sells)? Yes or No

4. If indicators are still looking good and you want to move the item into your portfolio its time to go all out.

4. Portfolio Phase
Start buying and setting up your orders now, you should have run the numbers and should be good to go all out. As time goes on you will get an even better idea of how much competition there is for an product, how much volume you can push, and how much isk your really making.

• Run the numbers check for the margins and the expected monthly totals. You want to get a general idea of what your going to make on the item this will help you later on as your portfolio expands to compare good trades to better trades.
• Don't forget to keep an eye on other regional markets through Eve Central, contracts and general chatter.
• Use tools like EveMon and EveMentat also Eve Neocom App for mobile devices to check: Product Orders is your volume low do you need to restock? You can tell when you have been undercut or its a low player day when order volume isn't dropping.

Optional Expansions
Regional Expansion: Run test phase at other locations in region. Then see how much of a regions volume you can capture.

Hostile Take Over: Identify constant undercut persons or stations. Bring in goods at lower price to remove them. Careful not to drop price to much.  Be creative here remove their supply, drop the price, hire some hit men.

Portfolio Review: After you have a long list of trade items, review your monthly numbers. Replace poor performers with test products or take strong performers into new regional markets.

Overnight/Weekend Investments: Keep a list of expensive low margin items for days when you need your money moving but are on vacation or have a busy weekend.

Operation: Cynosural Field Generator I

It was March. I had about 75 million to my name. When I happened upon Cynosural Field Generator I in the market window. The price at the time was around 2.7 to 2.5 million. I quickly did the calculations and at the time my build price was around 1.8 million. Adding it up in my head I was going to make millions. Now for a player that only had about 100 mil to his name the prospect of making 500k margins was insane. I bought a blueprint and got right into production. After my first weeks worth of units rolled off the line I took my profits and bought a second blueprint. They cost about 30 million a piece, a pretty hefty investment when my total net worth came to about 100 mil. I kept running the calculations I was going to be rich. I would be making millions a month and soon be on top of the world.

Several weeks later the price dropped as the market caught up and the margins came down to about 100 to 200k a unit. Not bad but nothing like I was expecting long term. It taught me that the markets shift constantly if something is a good build or trade today it soon won’t be so you have to act fast and stay on top of the changes and when you get really good you will start to predict these changes. The other thing it taught me was diversifying. If I had bought several different blueprints I could have spread out my small investment and kept my margins higher.

After another month I bought several more cyno blueprints and started researching them and used the money I had made to buy still other blueprints and invest in a wide range of manufacturing goodness. Even though today I run a wide assortment of manufacturing I still attribute all the money I have made back to that first start up with the Cynosural Field Generator I.

The TOS Storm Rumbles On

We have all been hearing about the change to the Terms of Service agreement. I didn't really care that much until I read this story over at TMC about this huge scam and the claim that this was the reason the TOS was changed.

The short version some people got scammed pretty good I might add, to the sum of 400 billion isk. Someone got banned and this party is claiming the reason the TOS was changed was in due part to this scam. (The article is well worth the read and a brilliant scam the methods only slightly shader than the average scammer.)

The GM team who under a lot of fire posted this clarification the day after the news was posted about the TOS change. The short version here is that basically you can still scam and all this was always in our EULA now it is just more visible.

The article about the scam in question pretty much stated the same thing as the clarification post by the GMs. Concluding that GM's can give judgement on a case by case basis. They can decide how to handle a situation. Now up until this point I haven't heard of a really good reason for the TOS change.  Now whether or not this scam has anything to do with the change still remains in question. But until we hear an official word on things I think peoples questions are going to keep piling up and answers will be in short supply.

CCP is taking discussion on the topic in the forums here.

Guns, Germs, and ISK

Your just starting out you have in mind that your goal in Eve is to gain vast amounts of isk. How do you beat the odds when they seem so stacked against you, in that other players have better skills, more isk and play longer than you?  The first fact you need to understand is someone else is always going to have better skills, more isk and play more than you. Work with what you got not with what you want.

Skills
No matter how long you have been playing someone else is going to have higher skills point totals than you. This doesn't mean they are better it just means there are some activities or ships that they can experience that you can't. So get out there fly with what you got. You have to fly smarter because your cargo ship can't carry as much. You have to plan better, waiting to shoot through a pack of npcs rather than just attack the whole mission room at once. And one reason there will always be very high skilled character is because you can actually trade characters for in-game money.

Time
No matter how much you play, no matter how much you multi box, or run multiple accounts someone else is always going to have more time to play than you. So right about now I might tell you some of my sentiments for playing the game in the first place; like not making it a job that's your call not mine but do try and have a little fun after all it is just a game.

Isk
There are a lot of rich players out there. What you need to understand is there are even more powerful groups of players out there with vast amounts of resources. So what can you do alone to try and find a piece of the pie? Aside from a few get rich quick schemes getting rich in Eve is similar to the real world it takes a lot of hard work and being quick on your feet. There is no easy mode to getting rich quick. You just keep at it, and true it goes a little faster in Eve Online in terms of real time but it will happen. Now that is if your just working alone, if you work together with others you will find there is still plenty of pie to go around.