DCUs - A Profit Story

I wanted to do a write up on this for a while, but much to my suprise, this market just kept and kept on giving. Anyway, time to share with you another profit story...

Drone Control Units:

DCUs are one of many cap mods I manufacture for the Jita market. Like other cap mods, it is vulnerable to 'thin markets' as they take a long time to build. A run of 10 takes a week or so to build in station so if supplies run thin, it can take a long while for manufacturers to meet demand.

So... it is a market I often abuse. Normally when I buy up stock and relist, the massive margins only last a small while before another trader notices the margin and sources stock, or a manufacturer dumps a load onto the market at much lower margins that isn't attractive for me to buyout. On average, I have a sales window of maybe 12-24hrs before this happens.

Well, with the DCUs... its been over ten days now...

The opportunity:

A week or so ago, I noticed a thin market on DCUs which were priced around 61mill (note: build cost was around 60mill). So I pounced and bought up underpriced stock:

I relisted this stock with some I had manufactured myself.

32 mods - thats a lot of stock. I went to bed and expected to sell maybe 10 of those mods. To my suprise, by the following evening, all 32 had been sold (~480m profit). I even caused a nice bump on the market graph:

 Cool I thought, lets list some more I had built:

And so for the next few days this continued (note how little stock is available). The 15mill markup over build cost remained. If manufacturers had noticed, then it would take them several days to produce stock so I continued to make the most of the lack of supply:

After a few days, it seemed that the new price point I had set had stuck:

Hrmm, I thought, what now?

Well lets take it higher shall we!

So I moved up the price another 10mill. Very reasonable.

And it's been sticking too! Recently the price has trended down to around 81mill, but lets see how long I can keep it up... :)


A recent market graph:

Thanks for reading o/

cheebs


1 month later: Supply has built up driving prices down and the excellent margins have finally collapsed. Nevertheless, over the course of the past month, I sold over 140 DCUs at an average profit margin of ~14mill. It was a fun manipulation.

The Result: