Advanced Trading Guide

All of this, you should probably already know, but let's make sure.

Trading (green pocket watch) -> Advanced Materials (purple DNA) -> Scientific (blue beaker)
and
Mining (orange pickaxe) -> Manufacturing (yellow gear) -> Technology (teal microchip) -> Power Generation (red battery)

High-wealth systems will have up to 5 trade goods, and therefore you should always trade in systems with a strong economy with buy/sell modifiers as close as possible to -30/+80. Or barring that, buy in -30 and sell in +80.

Each economy type will be referred to by 4 synonyms on the galactic map, and the wealth level has 8 synonyms per level (low/medium/high). This means that although there are actually only 21 distinct economies, there are 32 ways to refer to each one, giving a total number of 672 variant descriptions for 21 economies. The illusion of variety, right? We only care about 224 of these variants.

In terms of economy strength, the ones you care about are: Advanced, Affluent, Booming, Flourishing, High Supply, Opulent, Prosperous, Wealthy.

If each economy strength type were equally common in the game, this would mean you are obliged to disregard 2/3 of all systems for trade purposes. However, it's worse than that, because strong economies are proportionally more rare. You're going to have to hunt them out, and there's no convenient way to highlight them on the galaxy map. This is the hard part of creating trade routes. They have a lot of initial investment time before you see a return. However, after you've developed your infrastructure, it's basically an automatic money machine that you just need to run through for a while.

Find a suitable system for each of these 7 economy types and make a base there, preferably at a trade outpost (I'll explain why). There is absolutely no difference in economy from planet to planet within the same system. Each system has only two kinds of trade terminals: station and not-station. The station terminal offers worse prices... but I've seen it have a greater variety of trade goods, probably at random. The not-station trade terminals are every other terminal in the system, including ones you make yourself. You will get the same prices from any not-station trade terminal, including at your base and on your freighter.

Wait, then why am I asking you to make a base at a trade outpost rather than just using your freighter? Well, first of all that would require jumping through each and every system in the route, which would require them to be more or less geographically contiguous. Also, it costs fuel and even more time. Or alternatively you'd have to play a game of teleporting to each station, getting in your ship, summoning your freighter, getting in it, doing the trade and then teleporting to the next hop on the trade route. Which all sounds just awful, and you'll spend more time in transit than you will on trading.

But aside from all that, I told you I'll explain why. Be patient.

As you fully deplete/saturate each system, prices (and inventory of the stuff you buy) will take time to rebound. Other guides suggest it takes 60-90 minutes, but I haven't tested this. After you get your principal 7 bases set up, you may want to integrate 7 more (or 14 or 21, etc). Rather than creating more than one distinct trade route for each economy loop, create a single route that encompasses all compatible systems in the proper order, such that by the time you get to the end, the starting system has had time to recover its prices and inventory:

Trading #1 -> Adv. Mat. #1 -> Sci #1 -> Trading #2 -> Adv. Mat. #2 -> Sci #2 -> Trading #1

If you're traveling from system to system via teleporter, you're going to require a lot of hops on your trade route. You can get through each one in, what, a minute or two? That implies you're going to need at least 3-4 dozen hops on your route. On the other hand, this also means you're going to be making millions of credits dust units moneys every couple minutes after you're able to buy out a system of every good you want.

The game recalculates prices on a per-transaction basis regardless of volume, meaning you always want to buy and sell in max bulk. Buying 50 trade goods one at a time will cost you vastly more than buying all 50 at once. Selling 50 trade goods one at a time will net you vastly less than selling all 50 at once. This is absolutely irrational market behavior (what local economy would intentionally buy 50,000 more goods than they expect to need?), but it's how the game works. Call it arbitrage of inefficiency: it's the way you're making most of your money. Of course you wouldn't buy or sell one good at a time, but this also means you shouldn't buy or sell more than once per good per system per run, ever.

This means that, actually, the best way to make money isn't to gradually buy and sell at each system. That will work fine, yes, but it doesn't maximize your profit.

You should actually buy and buy and buy and buy until you run out of money or inventory space, then check out which of the compatible systems will give you the best price for each of your gigantic stockpiles of goods, and sell the entire stockpile to that system. After you offload all your goods this way, you will have achieved the highest possible profit margin, which was defined by your starting capital (or inventory space). The next round should make you proportionally more money, as long as you constantly deplete your own cash reserves, and have more inventory space, and give each economy time to return to baseline.

Because of the way trade terminals work, this also means that all your goods of a given type need to be within the same inventory (exosuit, starship, freighter), but it doesn't matter how many stacks you have in that inventory. The trade interface aggregates all identical goods in a single inventory, so you can sell them all at once. What you can't do is simultaneously sell the same good from multiple inventories. If you do, you'll be getting a worse price on the second inventory sale, proportional to how badly you crashed the economy on the first sale. Don't make this mistake. Any given trade good should only exist in one place.

Inventory space actually isn't going to be a limiting factor until you're into the hundreds of millions in profit per system ballpark. 40 inventory slots (for the sake of argument) times a trade good stack size of 100 (sadly, not 9999) gives you 4,000 goods to sell at once. If that good happens to be, say, Superconducting Fiber, then to buy 4,000 of them you'd have to have gone to several advanced materials economies, and hopefully you didn't spend more than 4,000 x 0.7(50,000) = 140 million buying it all. Then you can pick one scientific economy system in which to sell them all at once, and you should ideally make 4,000 x 1.8(50,000) = 360 million. For a net profit of 220 million or about 157% ROI.

Fine I guess I'll tell you, not that you were especially patient about it. You probably skipped all the way here without reading the rest. Selling to a pilot at a trade outpost doesn't affect the prices at the trade terminal! If you offload a gigantic quantity of trade goods through the trade terminal, the price will collapse for that good until the economy has time to recover. If you instead offload that gigantic quantity of trade goods to a pilot who just landed at the trade outpost, that won't happen. So for selling purposes, you don't actually care about the trade terminal at all. You set up shop at a trade outpost (not a colossal archive, not a minor settlement) because that is where the highest number of random pilots always show up with the least amount of walking (jetpacking?) to do between them.

However, a major caveat of using random pilots is, their prices are not anchored to the system. You have to actually know whether you're getting a good deal. So you should probably check the trade terminal first to establish a baseline, then find any pilot offering at least that good of a price. It's actually not worth the extra time to find a pilot giving you "the best price" since there is no specific best price and you could be looking all day. The name of the game here is satisficing. Find the first pilot that crosses the price threshold and sell to them.

It used to be feasible to exploit the economy by picking several high-value goods that are commonly available (regular/ionized cobalt, chlorine, silver, gold, platinum), buying out an entire system's supply, then moving to the next system, selling everything to crash the economy, then buy it all back along with whatever extra was already in the system and repeat this process from system to system.

The rationale of crashing the economy was that you're able to buy the goods (plus more) back for less than you made selling them in the first place (due to the per-transaction issue mentioned above), and trade terminals have no cap on the amount of goods they will allow to be sold simultaneously. Only your inventory capacity defines the most you can sell at once.

This method was supposedly able to make a dedicated player over 100 million credits units schmeckles moneys in an hour, which is strictly more than the system I outlined above (~60 million per hour if you actually grind the full hour and depending on how fast you can clear a given system).

The most important caveat of this exploit was: you have to pick goods that each system already sells, because if you sell a good that isn't already listed for sale, the good just disappears and will not be available to buy back. This is why people generally defaulted to cobalt: it is reliably available in every single system.

This method is no longer feasible because a) systems seem to rotate goods more frequently now (not including cobalt) but more importantly b) each system has a much smaller stockpile of goods available (including cobalt), so you don't gain very much inventory by crashing the economy of a system. You can still do this, but your rate of return is going to be tiny unless you already have a gigantic stockpile of some valuable good... in which case you may as well use the trade route method instead.