The Life of PI

Planetary interaction is an interesting profession.  When you first hear about it, people are praising it as "passive income".  I guess that is true, but there are other factors to consider.  I would like to discuss PI a little bit and maybe work out the myth from the truth.  This is based on my experiences and veterans may or may not agree with me.

PI as a passive income.  If by passive you mean, moving PI around from planet to planet, to the station and two the market.  Then yes, I guess it is.  If by passive you mean, import and export taxes, market listing fees and sales tax, then yes, I guess it is.  I'm not trying to be facetious.  Many people forget to think of all the costs associated with the industrial side of Eve.  Once you figure out what it really costs you to bring your PI to the market, the profit margin isn't as high as you might think.  

I have also found that the PI market is very finicky.  I would venture to say that most PI items are down right sluggish. I have had PI items sit on the Dodixie market for weeks before I either sold it to a buy order or took it off the market. There were some slim instances where the actually sold for what I wanted it to (or reasonably close).  

You really have to pay attention to a few things.  First, high sec PI should be a last resort.  If you want to do PI and you aren't afraid to venture into low sec, you are really doing yourself a disservice.  I do run some high sec PI, but it is basically a place to plop factory planets down.  I use low and null sec planets, extract raw and convert to T1 or T2 and then use covert ops transports to bring those items to high sec where they are transfered to the factory planet to be made into the high end T2 and T3 products. Second, you will need to watch the POCO / Customs Office tax levels.  You can leave yourself open to massive ISK losses if you pay too much in player-set taxes. Finally, you want to understand the market.  You should be cognoscente of what is selling, how fast and for how much.  

I would suggest you start with the safe bets.  I consider these to be Oxygen (the easiest to do), Coolant and Robotics (the most time consuming of the three). These three items sell because they are used in the production of fuel blocks (all races).  To some extent, mechanical parts, consumer electronics and enriched uranium are also safe bets.  Anything else could take a while to sell and you will have to mess with the sell orders a lot.  I would never sell to buy orders for the aforementioned PI.  If you have other items that you find slow to sell, you may want to consider selling to a buy order as a last resort.  You could also try contracting.  I have never sold PI on contract, but I don't see why it wouldn't sell.  I just don't find contracts have the exposure that market listings have (unless you promote your contracts).  

I have a caveat.  Advanced and High Tech commodities have an attractive market value but in my experience, they are dogs. Supercomputers are used in the construction of things like POS Control Towers.  They cost a lot to buy, if you want to get into the structure building business, so that may be a consideration.  I have not had good luck with selling them for profit.  They involve a lot of handling.  They cost a lot to export as well.  If you have someone who uses them in production, you can make a pretty good business partnership, but to sell them on the open market, not so much.  

Bear in mind, these are my experiences.  Yours may differ.  You might be in an area where the market is different.  I am sure in Jita, everything sells faster than in Dodixie (or Rens, or Tash).  You can always experiment to see what sells better in your area.  If you do, I would suggest selling at least 5000 units of advanced commodities as a litmus test.  If you do too little volume as a test, you will get skewed results because someone might only need a few items.  

Do I consider PI as passive income?  No..  I really don't.  It is less involved than mining and trading, but it still requires a bunch of time to run planets.  

What are your thoughts and experiences?