I recommend using one of these tools if you wanna make big bucks trading.
http://www.elitetradingtool.co.uk/
https://eddb.io/trade/loops
These tools are nice and all, but there's a couple of points I'd like to make regarding trading:
- Everyone has access to these tools and a good trade route that you might discover will also be discovered by others, meaning it's lifespan is shortened. Also sometimes the data is really outdated.
- If you want to make big bucks with normal commodities there's two things you need: A huge ship (Type-6 with maxed out cargo at least) and a huge budget to start off with. That's because all the big profit commodities (big profit meaning beyond ~1200Cr/t profit) will be in the >5000Cr/t price range. All other commodities are not even worth looking at, really. If you're not doing that, you're better off bounty hunting because it'll net you more cash (and it doesn't get boring as fast)
- A good trade route means >1200Cr/t profit in BOTH ways. If you're not doing that profit in both ways you're losing time and you're better off searching for another traderoute.
- High/mid/low tags for supply/demand actually aren't as important as they seem. It's the actual amount of these goods that determines the price (aka a Medium demand of 200,000 goods will set the sell price higher than a High demand of 50,000 goods). Kind of stupid because it makes all the other stations with lower amounts of supply/demand irrelevant (the lower population stations).
Now if you actually want to find a trade route yourself and not with a trading tool (comes with the benefit that you might actually be the only one that found it) - this is taken from a guide, but shortened:
1) Filter your galaxy map on Refinery, Industrial and High Tech and set the filtering by Population and the MIN slider to like 66% or even higher. This will filter out anything that isn't Large, Very Large or Huge systems/stations. (this helps with finding a large amount of goods on supply and demand, last point I talked about in the last paragraph)
2) Now go through stations for these systems and find one that is Very Large or higher and even better if it also has the Wealthy tag. Mind you that it also matters how far from the star/jumping entry point the station is.
3) Go to this station, open commodities and look for commodities that have a supply of 50,000+ AND the price >5000Cr/t. For this commodity you look at the systems it is exporting this commodity to. If one of these systems that it is exported to also fits the criteria in step 1
4) Then you fill your ship with this commodity and go to that system. You sell the commodity, checking that you make at least 1200 or 1300 Cr/t profit.
5) Now you repeat the process in step 3 for this station and hope that you find a suitable commodity that returns you back to the station you came from (A > B > A, 1 jump trade route), if not you might have to do another jump (or more) to another station before returning (A > B > C > A), or find another route.
I have yet to find a good trade route that goes both ways, then again I didn't dabble in it too long yesterday as I decided I want to do a bit of bounty hunting which also helps me up the reputation/rank in Empire (for dem imperial clipper). So I bought a Viper MkIII and fully kitted it out and went bounty hunting in RES. Earned about a million yesterday in what, 30 minutes? Really profitable if you do it right.
So if you want to min/max your sick credit gainz you shouldn't trade before you can make more money than bounty hunting.
I'm helping my Dear Lady Aisling Duval spread messages of love and truth.
I'm joining this hooker for the sweet bounty bonus perk
