Well, sure. Profits do tend to increase when you completely ignore expenses.
Luckily you don’t have to commit financial fraud to turn a profit either. I frankly don’t care about T1 but T2 production is doing very nicely for me right now.
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I’d guess producing canes and phoons right now would turn a profit.
sorry for ripping it out of context. not fully awake yet. 
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What I mine if free is an age old debate in eve. You can crawl down this rabbit hole to an insane degree.
The basic premise is that the minerals you mine have a value. They can be sold on the market for X. (Going to ignore the whole is this the best economic use of time debate). Now in theory, you want all manufacturing to increase the value of X. Say a Kestrel increases the value of the minerals by 20% after manufacturing costs, so profit is now X * 1.2.
However, how fast do minerals move on the market? How fast do Kestrels? Does that pace meet your income needs? How easy is it to move the produced item to the market ? All of this can impact a manufactoror’s plan and goal. Sure Kestrels may make 20% profit but move so slow that you don’t earn enough rapidly. Maybe slashers make 10% profit but sell 6 times faster. Maybe Ravens actually lose 5% profit, meaning you could sell the minerals for more. However, it’s easier to move Ravens to your market and they sell faster than the minerals would.
The end result is that a corp may sell for slightly under because an item moves faster or is easier to manage. The corp still sees profit for the time spent mining but it is not the most economical use of their time, but it works for them.
Now if you come along, buying minerals and hoping to make a profit just from manufacturing, you are out of luck because that corp accepted a lose of max profit but are still making some profit while your setup requires mac profit to work. This is what makes the economy of eve tough. You need to find your niche that works for you.
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Depends what expenses you are talking about?
Hmm lets see…
Skillbooks, Standings, at least the best reprocessing implant, t2 fitted proc (can use t1 strips but tank the darn thing)…thats about it really.
Because lets see, if you are gathering stuff your stuff, mining/missioning/PI, then the only real expense after the extraction equipment is blueprints and the npc production costs…and BPC’s are really cheap.
1-2 million last i checked for a 10 run 10/20 retty…faster and 100% cheaper to gather and build your self as opposed to buying the ship off the market.
Oh yeah whats the opportunity costs before some dumb ass starts that argument again…
1 Proc, about 30 million kitted out
2 hours mining 4,539,007 ISK (sub time)
5 million isk worth in production costs (100 destroyers)
PvE/PvP/PvP Ganking = fun, the right target(s) 250 million isk per hour…
Opportunity costs: about 200 million + ISK for days/weeks on end per hour for 2 hours of indy. The beauty of it, i did not have to pay a single ISK to another player if so wished, i kept all my ISK to myself. 
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The thing is, that (normal scale) mining is the worst ISK/h you can have in game. Any other activity you spend the same time on, nets you more income … to buy the raw materials for your production. The mining materials yourself step, reduces the ISK/h, if this is a metric you care about. I’m also sometimes mine, but only if there is no other things to do besides flipping my orders.
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Now see, without ayeipsia obviously not attempting to get into the impossible task of detailing every detail in indy under the sun, I can say she gets it. This is the first person i have seen in any of the forums about eve that i would not mind having a “real” indy discussion with.
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depends how you define (normal).
And yes if all you care about is ISK, anything else does outstrip mining for profits.
In fact i have always said mining for ISK is dumb.
But there is a reason for mining, and a reason for Indy.
only one provides any real ISK production.
But both hand in hand are more important than other things…for reasons.
The expense of not selling that dank mission loot of yours or the minerals you refine from it when you could in fact just do that. That is what opportunity cost means.
If you end up making more from reprocessing your loot than selling it, you are making profit. If not, then not.
If you end up making more from manufacturing goods than from selling the minerals as they are you are making profit. If not, then not.
That’s mainly what people mean when they say that minerals mined yourself are not free, and that’s what opportunity cost means: You have some ore, you have the opportunity to sell it for cash right away, and you don’t take it. This doesn’t mean you won’t make profit in the end, but you only make profit if you end up with more cash than you would have if you had sold the ore right away, no matter where the ore came from in the first place.
Oh boy, now we are there again. 
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you have the opportunity to go see a show that would cost you $30
and
a friend at the same time has tickets for a different show that cost $40, and offers 1 to you for free.
you wish you could go to both shows.
What is the opportunity cost?
I think a lot of it has to do with speculation of either war time economies, or moon mining changes. Many things have spiked in prices in the last few days. I think goons are just buying out jita for their doctrine ships. I wouldn’t use the last few day’s prices as a baseline for anything.
using the eve-industry site linked in the OP it looks like building 100 thrashers costs 84.5mil in minerals. I’ll just use your 5mil for a nice round number for the BPC and Build costs. You end up committing 89.5mil in resources to the build, well looks like the 100 thrashers sell for 99mil netting you ~8.5mil in profit.
However if say 100 thrashers were going for 80mil it would make sense to just sell the minerals instead of building thrashers. Also if we add in the difficulty of shipping 100 thrashers, well it’s much easier to just move the minerals. the 100 thrashers are 500,000 m3, where the minerals required are only 58,797m3.
and OP check out the Missile Guidance Computer I, they cost 7621 isk to build, and are selling for over a million right now! Sure you probably won’t get a million for one, but if you sell in the 20k range you are making over double your money. looking at the price history graph many have sold in the 35k range.
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not if using the truest form of opportunity cost, and not the half-baked idea that involves only ISK.
edit: also remember when you use the pricing from 3rd party sites it assumes you are buying the minerals from sell orders, you do not in fact get that price after broker and tax fees, so you numbers may be incorrect in any regard.
ok, in regards to Chainsaw…
The best you could require in resources that could be moved in a single for those Thrashers is
64,957, 423 ISK if dumping to the buy orders in 4-4.
And this is for easily obtainable resources in highsec, because if you want to talk nullsec that is a different animal all together and you should get with your Alliance Reps instead.
Now back to the OP since this discussion has been derailed enough as is.
Original statements and questions
Most Items are losing 10%-40% at current market prices.
Why is the economy so very bad in this game?
These are Industrial related items,
not mining
not marketing
not opportunity cost
The easiest answer…is quit buying minerals, 3rd party sites, almost every single one i have looked at assumes you are buying them from sell orders and even if you delete that portion still augments the profit margin or profit per hour rate as if you still purchased them from sell orders.
As an Industrialist (Builder), you must gather them your self, get corp mates to assist, or be creative in a way that will make local miners where you are at to sell their gathered resources to you instead of to the market at acceptable rates that will allow you to mass produce effectively to turn a profit.
To conclude I will say as i have always have
A true Industrialist is one…
That Mission Runs
That Ganks when necessary
That Bumps when necessary
That Researches, Invents, and Mines when necessary.
That plays cut throat market games when possible.
Studies Zkill, Reddit, and all the other relevant blogs and sites out there.
Stays appraised of in game Meta Politics, Nullsec/FW/Merc Circles/Gank organizations.
Trusts no one any farther than you can shoot them, ruin their fun in game, or Punch them in the Face in RL.
An Industrialist has one eye on his ledger, one eye on everyone and everything around them, one hand on a gun (or strong stick/carrot method) and the other hand, well place your fingers into as many of everyones pots as possible while keeping the palm on his money.
after this post im done with this convo as it is too easy to derail into other tangents.
OP, there is a reason my corp has over 1 trillion ISK in researched prints and several hundreds of billions of other assets laying around in a very short time. Take that as you will.
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ah yes, low balling local miners, a classic way to make a profit. Why are they selling to you for cheap and not moving to a hub to sell for a higher price, or using it in their own manufacturing? Sure it makes sense to allow for some discount due to shipping, but that shouldn’t be too much.
and I like that those websites assume you are buying from sell orders, better to overestimate your build costs, than underestimate. Plenty of stuff is profitable using those prices. Sure many builders use buy orders and get a discount on their inputs, but various people have different bottlenecks and sometimes you need to buy off sell orders.
If you require lowball prices to profit on an item you would almost always be better off selling the materials.
Hooray, pointless real-world comparisons!
Unless those two shows are exactly the same otherwise, and you don’t care about being with your friend, they aren’t comparable. Your friend offering you to give you a ticket is not a potential financial gain, unless you consider taking the ticket and selling it, which would be a bit of a dick move. Watching a show is typically not a financial gain either, so no matter if you go with your friend or watch the 30$ show or spend the evening playing online spaceships instead, the opportunity cost technically is wasting 3 or 4 hours of time you could potentially have spent working and making money. Nobody in their right mind would go around claiming that they go watch a show with their friends in order to make profit off it. Usually, that’s just an expense in the end, at least as far as economics are concerned.
Only that in the real world it’s not quite as simple as in Eve: In the real world you cannot just spontaneously go out and start making cash as easily. Most people have a day job that’s about 8-ish hours a day. They can’t typically just stay at work and get paid more beyond that, and finding another one that you are qualified to do and that covers the evening hours when you’d typically watch your show isn’t all that trivial. Sure, some people have multiple jobs or do freelance work or make money through other means, but there’s only so much time a normal person can spend working every day before burning out.
In Eve, it’s easy to mine or rat or do whatever to get money at any given time, and it’s easy to buy or sell whatever at any given time because the market literally is just one click away.
I am not saying that everyone should always take every bit of opportunity cost into account. I know I completely ignore it most of the time, simply because I don’t typically care about the economy part of Eve. Nothing wrong with that. It’s a game after all, and entertainment holds more of an ideological value than economical one. But at the same time I don’t go around claiming that I am making mad profits by doing that, because I’m not.
Here’s another funny real-world comparison, by the way, that shows a major difference between Eve and real life: In the real world, companies try to keep their profits as low as possible, so they can save tax. So they factor in every little expense they can possibly get away with and they often even make up expenses where there are none. In Eve the taxes are paid on certain transactions, not on your profits, so people have no problem doing the opposite and trying to hide or ignore certain expenses, so their numbers look bigger at the end.
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Eve is a game. The measure of value should be fun/hour. ISK/hour turns it into a job.
If you enjoy mining, refining, building and selling and end up with more ISK in your wallet at the end of the process then you’re getting good value for your subscription dollar. The fact that you might have made more ISK selling compressed ore in Jita is irrelevant unless you would have enjoyed that activity just as much.
The ideal situation of course is to make enough doing something you enjoy to pay for your subscription. Industry and markets are by far the easiest way to do this in Eve. Most of the processes are background - you only need to login to start or deliver the job.
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Not baseline, but as a producer you need to watch the market and sell into spikes. The current high demand (likely due to the war and people coming back to the game) stays for some time.
I disagree heavily with this rather shallow approach of looking at it and i do so for good reasons. I strongly suggest rethinking this approach, especially because “fun / hr” does not fit well into what EVE ONLINE is and provides.
I apologize in advance for being so thorough and writing books. I am used to speaking to people, which makes it much easier for me to skip whole paragraphs of text (you know what i mean :p), because I can observe if the one who’s listening is actually able to follow.
From the “Things you should know before you design a game” department. While I’m by no means an expert, I know enough to share some thoughts. I need to, because such considerations are important for what I’m doing.
You can design a game for people who seek fun, like (usually horribly shallow and addicting) mobile games. You can design a game for people who seek satisfaction. You can mix them of course, but it’s dangerous, because you need to keep the balance between these two groups of players.
Changing a game, which was primarily designed for those who seek satisfaction, into a game for those who seek fun, is very risky. That’s part of what’s going on in EVE right now, where the old player base was, due to the nature of the game, more about gaining satisfaction than simply about having fun. I’m not saying no one had fun, or didn’t want to have fun. I’m saying that fun, taking under consideration how the game worked for it’s most part, definitely wasn’t the driving factor for most of its players.
As we all know, CCP is taking the slow approach, changing the game over years to come with every new generation accepting the status quo as the norm, alienating all those who see the new norm as an attack on their interests and, often enough, on the game itself.
The equation you’re looking for is “Satisfaction / Session”, assuming you care about the longevity of EVE. Yes, the distinction between Fun and Satisfaction is important and No, they do not mean the same thing. We’re talking about two different groups of people here and of course there’s overlapping, but in general can we split them up in “seeking fun” and “seeking satisfaction”.
EVE ONLINE has always been better suited to the latter type, with more and more of the former type joining the game. They’re easily visible.
“Fun” is the positive feeling you feel during an activity. One can build a tolerance to “fun”, which leads to “boredom” and the need of finding a new activity, which then provides “fun” again, until that too wears off. You need greater and greater fixes (as in: higher and higher doseages of a drug. See also: grinding and levelling up). Personally I would classify boredom as withdrawal of fun, which would turn those, who seek nothing but fun, into addicts.
See also: people whining about the game being boring and CCP not providing any new content for them; Mining is boring, make it more engaging; FW is boring; Missions are boring; i can’t find targets; etc. etc. These people are looking for fun and usually they’re unaware of what’s keeping them from having any, or what forces them to continually seek fun as if it was the centerpoint of existence.
Miners (and AFK Cloakers) are interesting cases. Miners, unless they saturate themselves with enough characters to keep the activity a fun one (example: being 100% occupied by quadrupleboxxing 
), pure solo-mining without social activity usually is not fun at all, unless you also enjoy watching paint dry, grass grow and a ticking clock.
Mining is, purposefully, an activity you can do while doing other things, in game or in real life. When silent solo-miners say “mining is fun”, while they’re actually doing something else (netflix, chatting), then what they actually mean is “mining is satisfying”. The outcome is satisfying.
So, just to be clear for those brains who do not actually read and can not see beyond their biasses, always only scanning for trigger-words: Mining can be fun under certain conditions, but in general mining is something that is not fun, but satisfying.
AFK Cloaking is also an interesting case. The fun part of afk cloaking is watching miners in a belt, without them knowing you’re there. It’s smack talking in local, enjoying the tears of your scared victims. It’s raking in the money from extortion. AFK Cloaking is satisfying, because of the long term effects, despite there not being any actual (or at least obvious) efforts. One can argue that “patience” is an effort, but I’m not willing to dive into that.
“Satisfaction”, in difference to “fun”, is the feeling you get as outcome of an activity. Like, for example, having a plan, following it through and succeeding. Success is not a requirement, but increases satisfaction. It is perfectly normal to fail, because satisfaction can still be drawn by those mindsets who understand that failure leads to improvement. Damn, I’ve failed really hard, but I’ve already learned quite a lot!
Failure, btw, for most is no fun. I’ll leave that to you to figure out why this is actually an important consideration and what mindset sits behind such thoughts.
Activities that are fun aren’t necessarily satisfying. Mobile games are deliberately designed to be fun, to get you addicted. The point of this whole post is:
Stop mixing fun with satisfaction. They’re not the same and differentiating between these two groups is important, otherwise you’ll alienate all those who do not simply look for fun. When you design a game it is crucial to know that, otherwise you’ll have a really bad day.
You can have fun hunting targets and you can feel satisfied when you catch and kill it. There is no “levelling up”. You can have fun doing market PvP and feel satisfied after making billions. Again, no “levelling up”. You can have fun doing industry and feel satisfied when your products are ready. Yet again, there is no “levelling up”.
Of course, here too, the feeling of satisfaction will eventually cease, but it will take you much longer, because there is no actual end and fun was not the important part of playing. The important part of playing was the feeling of satisfaction. You might feel saturated and grow bored of your own success eventually, yes, but it usually takes much longer to reach such a state.
Then you have missions. For an example it’s literally the elephant in the room. As CCP said themselves, there’s the type who “levels up their raven” and eventually quits the game out of boredom once they’ve done them all, fly loot pinatas and sit on richness they have no actual use for.
These people look for “fun”, but not for satisfaction. There is no satisfaction, unless the player had a plan behind what he does, like mercs grinding up for locator agents. The primary purpose of missions is to have fun shooting NPCs and levelling up (and making money, but that’s beyond the point). You level up by being able to buy bigger ships, more expensive gear and reaching the next level.
Eventually it’s done. Boom.
CCP, WE DEMAND NEW CONTENT! And they do that why? Because they only care about having fun, and they eventually stop having fun, compared to those who seek “satisfaction”, who usually have long-term interests.
So, to end this, and I hope I didn’t make any serious mistakes:
Fun/hr is for mobile games, with an audience CCP seems to be attracting now. (see also: the threads about CCP’s marketing tactics). Satisfaction / Session is for games like EVE ONLINE. When you only look at the fun things, you will eventually end up with a LOT of bored people who will eventually quit the game after playing through all the “fun” activities, because these people only ever care about their own fun and not about anything for the long term. Just like those who only play to level their ravens.
“The Agency” is another sign that CCP caters to people who seek fun. They have no actual reason to play anymore and CCP needs to give them content they can do so they can have fun. In my eyes it’s pretty obvious that these people really aren’t good for the game, but that’s not the point of this post.
Shades of grey exist everywhere, but it’s fully valid to seperate these people into two groups. That’s why I do not play mobile games, because they’re made to milk addicts. Kudos to anyone who plays them without ever paying anything, but you’re still being caught by the addicting content they provide.
So, please … differentiate. It matters.
Thank you.
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I have fun mining. Even if you claim I don’t. Satisfying are the skill injectors and I can quit those any time, I swear.
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Well, with your claim at hand, tell me what is it you do that makes mining fun and what do you do while you wait for the rocks to show up in your hold? and how many chars are mining?