Flooding the Market - Too many items.

When learning about investments, there's almost always a singular piece of advice that gets promoted and doled out to every potential investor:

Diversify.

So, why do I feel the need to diversify right now? Two words, market saturation. The items I've been making for the regional market are now reaching their saturation point, it would seem. Here is some in game data to help make my point.

Item A has been one of my favorite sellers. I picked up the BPO and started making these, they were wildly profitable for the first few batches. They would completely sell within 3-4 days (especially over the weekend) and I'd get to take a Scrooge McDuck-style bath in the ISK. Things were great. My batch size for those has been between 10-25.

How did I arrive at my batch size? Simple.

Check out the graph and the table:

 

The graph represents the 3-month history of the item. There was a very solid price range over the three month span, and it has gone up drastically over the past month. I got in on this item while it was high. I got in at the top end of the red line, which means I hit the bubble perfectly. The 5-day average has gone back down a bit and has crossed with the 20-day average representing a more stable average. This is great news to me, it means the price is pretty stable and I should earn what I expect to earn when I manufacture these.

I determine batch size by thinking about how many have been selling. For the most part, the region sees roughly 20 of these move each day. That means my batch size of 10-25 should be fine to sell-out fairly rapidly, hopefully in about 3-4 days if I stay on top of my market orders.

Competition, at this point, wasn't incredibly stiff. Things were moving at a nice pace without a lot of market maintenance.

However, in the past few days, something weird has happened. Check out today's market details for the region on this item:

The red boxes are circling out the market hub's orders. Three people have made what seems like an attempt to corner the market by selling a ton of them. At the usual rate of sale/day, it'll take 15-17 days to sell all these off the market. And these people are willing to keep dropping their price in a market war, therefore meaning those of us who make smaller amounts (looks like there are 6 people with smaller amounts of these) are going to have to play market pvp with these larger suppliers for the next half month, and the price will continue to drop as we play the pennies game 3-4 times a day.

With that said, let me give a brief manufacturing update:

I'm continuing to make rigs. I like the price of them, and they have the highest return of all the items I've been making so far.

I've got a few blueprints for ships, so I've expanded my operations into smaller ships. They aren't flying off the shelves, but they are selling, and they are drawing some profits, which is nice. I'm looking to make more ships and get them moving.

I still make drones and ammunition as well, they're moving fairly steadily. 

However, I'm going to attempt something new here in the future. I'm going to utilize a couple of my manufacturing slots to make much larger batches of items and sell them in Bulk. I'll be tracking this trend closely to see if the profits are worth it to move items this way or if it's better to move them through the regional market.

I'll be sending up a few "test balloons" in this regard.

I sent up another test balloon last week. I made five frigates and some small rigs and I moved them to a faction warfare system. I was the low price in the system, and there was no competition in the only station.

None of the items sold.

So, I packed them back up and moved them to the trade hub, which is working better for them. I'm not sure I'll ever try to sell there in that system again.

Thanks everyone for reading!

Fly safe.