There’s been several banks in Eve Online’s history. They ask you to deposit isk, promise to invest it, and pay you something like 1% interest per month.
This is not one of those.
Loans
I already have enough isk, and until that changes, I don’t want loans.
I do however want to lend out isk, and I want to organize it all in a single thread.
Futures
In addition, I want to get a type of futures market going in Eve. I sell a promise to buy a certain quantity of a good at a fixed price, at a certain point date in the future. If you outguess me on future price trends, you make money. If you start to lose confidence in your guess, you try to get someone else to buy your position.
Example
Here’s an example with round numbers. I’m selling a promise that on August 1st I will buy 1 PLEX from you at 4mil.
Let’s say you buy that promise from me for 0.5mil. If PLEX is sitting at 3mil on Aug 1st, you’ve just made 0.5mil. If PLEX is sitting at 3.6mil, you’ve just lost 0.1mil.
The key thing is that you don’t have to invest as much of your personal isk this way. In that example, if you win 0.5mil, you win it off an initial investment of only 0.5mil. That’s 100% return, which is more than you can get by just investing in PLEX directly.
In that same example, if you lose 0.1mil, you win it off an initial investment of only 0.5mil. That’s 20% loss, which is more than you can lose by just investing in PLEX directly.
So if you buy 100,000 units of the future contract in that example, you’re only spending 50bil to effectively bet on 100,000 PLEX (~300bil value).
And if, let’s say PLEX is sitting at 3mil on June 1st (100% profit), but you get some insider info that PLEX is going to rise to 4mil (100% loss), you take your 100,000 future contracts and sell them to some other interested party for 0.6mil. You make a nice 20% profit, which is not 100%, but it’s also not -100%.
I’m not in this to make isk, at least not initially. But I think this would be a really nice concept to get started in Eve, since it’s such a handy tool in real life.
Prototype
Unfortunately, game mechanics make it very hard to do this naturally, without the need for outside tools. I’m going to be handling it with my own spreadsheets and software and API.
Here is a link to a prototype of what the system would look like: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ig8yOP0sqSQtooknUuWBmqlmMG6rK5hrW5yFcWY0FDo/edit#gid=0
Feel free to modify the Name / # of futures owned ledger. The more future contracts are bought, the more expensive they get (if everyone thinks my guess is wrong, then it probably is wrong).
I am accepting and wanting suggestions, but note that this is just a rough prototype I made last week.
Only stable items for now
I will be offering futures contracts for PLEX, Injectors, and Multiple-Character Training Certificates. I don’t believe other items in Eve are stable enough, but feel free to convince me otherwise.
I want to allow people to invest in both short positions (betting that the price will fall) and long positions (betting that the price will rise).
Status and ETA
I am currently in the process of writing the software to make a nice, user-friendly, interface that lets you invest and that displays all the current investments and other relevant data. Once I’m done making this UI, I’ll work out the exact numbers and send this live.
ETA: April 17th.
