Update for week ending May 27, 2012

Assets
Cash                         224,665,617.12 ISK
Sell Orders                  649,845,192.00 ISK
Escrow                       190,760,781.00 ISK
Contracts                              0.00 ISK
                           --------------------
Total Current Assets       1,065,271,590.12 ISK


POS                                    0.00 ISK
Ships & Fitted Modules       261,227,439.91 ISK
Modules                                0.00 ISK
Blueprints                             0.00 ISK
Materials & Commodities                0.00 ISK
PLEX                                   0.00 ISK
Misc Items                    63,736,224.35 ISK
-----------------------------------------------
Total Assets               1,390,235,254.38 ISK
===============================================
   
Liabilities and Equity
Notes Payable                          0.00 ISK
Loans                                  0.00 ISK
Bonds                                  0.00 ISK
                                       --------
Total Current Liabilities              0.00 ISK
-----------------------------------------------
Net Worth                  1,390,235,254.38 ISK
===============================================


This was a pretty good week in terms of business. Overall profits were approximately 317 million ISK, just shy of my 350 million ISK per week goal. Considering the patch issues I've had, and the fact that I'm still playing Diablo III, I'm pretty happy.


Some of the changes I've made were to make sure most of my ISK was active. In other words, if there was ISK in the corporate wallet, it was spend buying cheap goods. As you can see in the Assets above, most of my ISK is tied up in inventory, meaning it's at work. 


Overall network is down a bit, however. This is because I converted a PLEX into game time for my second account. This should have no impact on my ability to continue growing my cash pile, since that PLEX was dead money  (it was not contributing to the growth of cash). I won't be keeping PLEX in inventory anymore. That 450 million ISK could have been used for trading, and I would have made more ISK in the last month. 


Going forward, there are a few more things I want to improve upon. First, if you've read past weekly updates, you may have noticed I had 0 ISK in escrow. That's because my purchases were mostly retail, rather than brokered buy orders. I've started trying out buy orders, but I find the turn around too long (buy orders sit there much longer than sell orders), which causes a supply issue. The buy and sell orders need to be balanced. 


Second, I will probably need to change what items I sell soon. Some of the items I trade are purchased in the high six figures and sold in the low seven figures. Profit margin is good, around 30-40% mark. But the volume isn't great, 10-20 a day. This is perfectly fine when you only have a few hundred million to invest, but when you get near a billion of ISK to invest, the only way to grow your income with this strategy is to grow the number of orders on the market. This requires much more effort (larger ships to move everything, more research time, more order management time, etc). Since my play time is fixed, I just can't scale. 


So my plan is too look for more expensive items to trade. That way, I'll have less orders to worry about, but I can still put the same amount of capital to work. However, because there are fewer high-value items available on the market, there are likely to be fewer retail opportunities with large margins. So I'm going to be using buy orders more extensively to try and keep those margins. I think this is quite doable. The buy orders I put in, I put in at just a few ISK over what was already there. But the margins are already insane, in the 400-500% range. I'm not surprised nothing is moving. I think if I offer reasonable purchase prices, I will get better turn around, and still keep very profitable margins. We'll see how that works out.