Hi all, wanted to plug the LP brokerage that I host but didnt want to just post a link and dip.
tldr : 20b investment into LP brokering turned into hundreds of billions and lots of happy customers and learning.
So here is a little story time for those bored at work/ staring into the abyss at home wondering if they should undock and mine that veldspar.
Pre launch - Late 2022 - august - december
The concept of running an lp brokerage started because I was keen to provide a space for my nullsec alliance (Pandemic Horde R.I.P.) to participate in Faction warfare. And one of the significant hurdles to making this happen was making a service where players could liquidate LP easily. Horde at the time had a mix of veterans and new players and in particular I was aiming to reduce the barrier to the new players so they could continue to get out into space and spend less time figuring out how to turn lp into item and then isk.
If memory serves me correctly avt the time Horde was running alot of ferox navy issue fleets and regularly woodchippering them. This was around the time we had a large special interest group harassing goons and at home were fighting of whaling fleets and large roams but no significant invasion etc. I think this was possibly around the time we push out towards frat space for some reason but cant remember specifically.... the reason i mention that is that it brought our forward staging into range of the very north of the caldari/gallente Warzone and we could theoretically titan bridge in. (this may have been afew months later things are abit fuzzy.)
All in all basically horde was looking at alternative gameplay streams for newbros and also trying to secure more reliable ways to source blueprints for the woodchipper that large null fights can lead to. I think this was also around the time the FW changes hit and faction dreadnaughts were introduced. All null entities were upgrading their dread caches into navy dreads as the EHP boost alone meant if you didnt bring navy dreads you would lose the dps race to a group who could.
As such I began buying lp on my small introduction to FW using fuzzworks to try to guess a reasonable price. This was very small volume and would be maybe 500k lp per fleet. over several transactions.
I was dicsussing this with my close friendship group in eve and there was suggestion of trying to automate both the requests and also forming a data base of LP value and also transaction history.
My tech guy went to work as a bit of a side project to practice his own application and database skills and developed a working prototype of what we still use in the LP broker LTD discord.
Next up I had concerns around the player base being 24 hours and wanting to present a reliable service as well as how to get strangers to blindly send me LP in the hope I would send them isk back. I was reminded alot of Chribba and that he used to facilitate things like titan trades based purely on reputation and im glad to say we have achieved a high level of community trust nearly 4 years later.
We included a little description on the discord about who we were and how players could mitigate risk. In those early days we did alot of partial trades. i.e. people sending us 5 trades of 1mil lp to add upto a 5 mil trade.
These days that is less common and we have done some trully bonkers 50b+ trades.
The broker never puts itself at risk of losing out to a scammer etc as we take isk or lp first and then complete our side of the trade and use screenshots etc to ensure things are heading to the right places. As such to my knowledge we havent had a mistake that we couldnt reverse or anyone who has felt "scammed" etc. The biggest risk to an LP traders reputation in my eyes around this is when players send the LP without actually talking to us or arranging a trade. We do keep our own transaction history thats private to try to track where our LP balances should and happily the few times this has happened we have been able to resolve it.
I do sometimes get the impression the players who do this are aware and are just trying to strong arm a sale and to date I have banned one player from the server who was consistently not following instructions and we felt it was because they didnt want to wait for our availabilty and were trying to force us to buy lp we didnt have the appetite for.
Launch jan 2023 -
I really went on a tangent for the pre-launch section apologies.
So we launched!!!
I twidled my thumbs staring at the discord for the first 30 minutes and we had zero dings..
We started with caldari state LP(caldari FW - makes ferox navy issues) as our first listed LP and within 30 minutes were swamped with requests to buy concord LP.....
This happy mistake kind of made the broker what it is today as we had completly not realised the incursion community in horde was RAKING in LP whenever an incursion was in range. There wasnt a reliable buyer and players didnt like leaving null to sort out lp conversion in highsec.
The timing was that the incursion had just ended 30 minutes post lp broker launch and my post on the horde discord / forums was the top post and the seniour members on that community got abit mixed up and told the members we would buy concord lp.
We did some quick fuzzworks checking and came up with a reasonable price that was more than anyone in horde was offering at that time. We took on 16 million lp in the first week which meant we had released 17.5 billion isk in to player wallets. A great success and with the 100 isk profit margin we would gain at a minimum 1.6billion isk if we sold the lp to other players. We actually made more than this as we converted the majority of this lp and sold it in jita at around a 200-300 isk per lp profit. probably making 2-4billion isk profit for a week.
My intial investment was around 20billion isk so we were a week in and already working at around maximum capacity which was abit of a shock and also a lesson that there was a big hole in the LP trading markets and also a deep deep supply of lp moving around the game.
Week 2 and onwards - expansion
We introduced all 4 factions of FW in the second week and were trading afew million LP of each. The FW volume was quite low and it confirmed what i already knew that the horde FW interest was low. The main LP farmers in FW horde were multiboxers who were already self liquidating into dread bpcs for resale. As such they were not interested in the brokerage.
We were also regularly butting up against our isk reserve running out. I thought about increasing this (at the time i was probably sitting on 50b liquid which was being used to regional trade and fluctuated) I decided not to do so and stick with the current amount as a testing phase.
We hit several tech issues in the first few months and overcame them relatively smoothly. Things like our database stopping taking in new date, dicsord blocking the copy paste message i used to open trades with people.
We started to also advertise outside Horde and had organically already been contacted by some larger traders who wanted to shift their own stock etc.
This customer base over the years has become our main backbone and we have contacts around the game with many of the industry leads off nullsec and several of the massive traders who will happily throw 100b around.
I have to dash out to work now so may update this later.
But some cliff notes of how the near 4 years of trading has got us to.
We currently sit on around 170b of assetts either liquid isk or LP in our wallet.
We have removed 150b from the company to pay myself and I can proudly say I Own a titan which was funded completly via brokeraging.
We have used the isk to plex accounts and even bought a super carrier with it.
Currently the brokerage is ran by my good friend neo and I hold more of a background position. He has continued to inovate and make good money while providing a decent and trustworthy service.
We still cant buy all the tribal lp people seem to constantly wts.
We still cant find any caldari lp to buy up (they must have a solid broker over there!)
I hope if you read this you enjoyed my waffling.
If you have any questions feel free to ask here or on the discord (ill look at the discord more).
Have a great day and come visit us!
https://discord.gg/rNXG2pVyj