The Vagaries of the T2 Market

Ship building in Eve is something that you can really get whipsawed on. The problem is that it takes time to bring product to market. If you're building in high-sec without a POS, it can take nearly a month to make the copies and then another 2 days to do the invention, 1 day to build the parts and 2 more days to build the ship. That's a long delay. Even if you have the BPCs handy (because you planned ahead with a little library), you're still looking at 4-5 days to get the ship online for sale.

When I started playing again, Huginn's were a ludicrously profitable item. They cost about 160mil in isk to build and could easily be sold for 205mil in Jita to buy orders (208 on sell orders, IIRC). Now they're selling for 158mil in Jita and cost about 168mil to build.

Likewise, Zealots last week were stupidly profitable (inventing with Circular Logic had a net EV per invention attempt of 78mil isk) but that very quickly evaporated to today's prices (which are still profitable but only about 17mil isk per attempt).

T2 ship building is a tricky business and there's some general tips you should follow
Get all of the component pieces (except for maybe reactor units, more on that) and research them: This requires metallurgy 5 so it takes some training but I highly suggest it. You're not going to build all of your components necessarily but you'd like to be able to. If money / research time is tight, at least get the big 5 (Microprocessor, Armor Plate, Capacitor Unit, Sensor Cluster, Shield Emitter... In that order). Those 5 represent 90%+ of the build cost of most T2 ships. The first three generally represent nearly 80%.

Diversify: The game goes through both macro cycles and micro cycles for both factions and ships. Minmatar are on a bit of a high right now but Amarr and Gallente both have some strong items. Many of the Caldari ships are struggling although there's some gems in there for the intrepid explorer. You'd like to be ABLE to build any of them.

Never stop copying: Copying will be your bottleneck 99% of the time. Even with a copy heavy POS setup, the ship copy times are ludicrously long for only a few copies. It takes about two weeks to get 5 copies of a cruiser BPO. It takes 5 days (inventing consecutively) to chew through those. Modules are a little bit better but not much.

Be ready to either sit on inventory or dump supplies: Sometimes the market turns so abruptly (as it did with the Huginns) that you can't build profitably at all (vs. the zealot which is just LESS profitable to build then it was). That's fine if you have some other T2 BPCs of that faction stocked away. If you don't, you have a decision to make. Sit on the inventory waiting for something to come back, or just dump the inventory. Frankly, dumping the inventory isn't a bad idea. Most of the time there's pretty decent spreads on the components anyways (I think you could make a reasonably good living just building T2 components, honestly). In particular, the shield emitter's have some stupidly high margins fairly regularly for some reason. You can currently build a Deflection Shield Emitter for about 15000 isk and sell one for about 25000 isk. The faster selling Armor plates, Sensor Clusters and Microprocessors generally have a 15-25% markup.

Be prepared to take your lumps: I had a Huginn built earlier in the week. Initial sell order was 185mil which was about 10mil lower already than what i was thinking when I hit the build order. Now it's competing with 158mil sell orders in Jita. If I think that market isn't coming back, I'd probably dump it for the cash. In this case, I think it's just a flood of product from when it was stupidly profitable three weeks ago. It's important, however, to look at the underlying component cost. In this case, Fernite Carbide has actually gone up while nanotransistors are roughly even. Technite hasn't yet come down to where it will probably level out (Akita T indicates a guess of about 90k isk per unit and I've learned not to bet against her). So I expect the market to come back on those. So I'm holding at my 185mil bid. There's about 20 sell orders in front of me which is about 5 day's worth of activity in Domain. So I'll just hold off and see. If it gets worse, I'll either slash my price to liquidate or pull the unit and move it to Dodixie or Rens for a better price (I hate making that trip though).

Work on your faction grind: As you're trolling around, keep the Agent finder open and find the easy distribution missions you can do. Faction is a pain but you really need to get it to 5.00 or better so you can anchor a hi-sec POS. POS maintenance costs are not super expensive (about $60mil per month). They can allow you to very profitably do module invention (hard to do with the copy wait times in hi-sec) while also allowing significantly faster ship invention/copying. Building 3 blockade runners should cover you for the month. Grinding faction is a pain but I've gotten mine up from negative to above 3.0 in just a few weeks.