Moving ISK: viator

Monday, March 7, 2016

Hauling Other People's Space Junk for ISK

As I write I'm casually flying my blockade runner around New Eden. Along my zig-zag route I'm grabbing trash people are selling in remote stations. Pretty glorious, huh?

Moving Junk Around

Most of it doesn't look like much by itself; I'm hauling T1 mods, ammo, gasses, a salad of scraps high and low volume. There are deadspace mods and other expensive items mixed in—but it's mostly trash salad.

Trash salad can be profitable though. I may not be flying a Leopard, but Viators are pretty quick—and I've got 13k m3 or so cargo space. I can make a lot of quick stops... and stash many things in my cargo. Why be picky? ISK is ISK!

Data Source

All the the data on these deals comes from EVE-central's trade finder tool (through my Python data scraping scripts.) That means I could drop most of them in a buy order in Jita for instant returns. Sometimes it pays to do that; Other times you can make 10x or 100x more ISK with a well placed sell order (when the first margin is low.) Cha-ching!

Barrier to Entry

The beauty is that without data tools and some experience this part of the market is both out of sight—and not attractive to other traders. There's a definite barrier to entry.

Do Your Thang!

These opportunities highlight one of the most delightful things about trading in EVE Online! If you have creativity and vision you'll not only make good ISK... but it'll happening in interesting and rewarding ways. Trading in EVE is good fun!

I'm certainly not looking for competition...my skills would make more ISK if I were station trading anyways. I'm just hoping to give you some trading ideas. Maybe you'll follow through with one of your funky station trading schemes. Maybe you'll take a new risk, or figure out a fun scamming strategy. Just don't do business as usual!

Now fly safe... and fly weird. o7

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Viator, I Choose You!!! 1 Account Speculative Hauling

Read about my new single-account speculative hauling strategy.

Long story short: I've been very sick for a while. I haven't had the time or energy to fly 2-3 speculative hauler pilots at once. Plus the 3-4 PLEX each month became a burden.

Instead I needed a low-effort good ISK alternative. I don't mean 2 Bil isk per day, (as in my old ways) I wanted something I could pick up here and there and cover one or two PLEX casually.

Picking a Ship

So I had to pick ONE account, character, and one ship for most of my hauls. It was between the Dramiel (fitted this way-ish) and a blockade runner (the Viator).

The Viator

I decided on the Viator. Why? Well it can do everything—and it warps around quickly. Things can get dicey in highsec (like if you don't insta dock at a hub) but if managed well they're amazing hulls.

Blockade runners aren't just great for lowsec though. They're amazing for making lots of quick stops around high security space—and are incredibly fast given their decent cargo size. (I don't like Deep Space Transports or the Orca for my kind of work. Too slow.)

Lowsec Access

I also wanted safe access to lowsec (good deals there) so the Dramiel became more of a situational ship rather than my main hauling hull. I still do use it or a Leopard—but only for very specific situations.

The Trading/Hauling Process

The actual hauling/trading part is pretty standard for me:

1. Run data scraping tools
2. Pick some good lowball sell orders
3. Check against hub prices (I like fuzzworks but an alt is optimal)
3. Buy & retrieve items
4. Sell in Jita or Amarr

Will this work for you? Probably not—unless you pull together some okay data tools. EVE-Central by itself doesn't get the job done unless you can sort and filter through it yourself. Otherwise most other trading strats will work better (and be more fun.)

This plays a lot like exploration. Fly around, not knowing what you'll find. Sometimes its good money and occasionally it's absolutely amazing (600M profit deals)!

Moving ISK