Just set the option and every trade route returned will end with a loop of trades that can be repeated ad infinitum. This loop may or may not involve the source station. If you want the loop to involve a certain station, set it as the destination.
There was an issue where loops involving the source station were getting ignored. I just fixed that.
Hello. I've noticed that the travel time between two locations is not helpful at all to determine profit per ton.
I tested this by travelling between point A and point B, one way, in a palladium route and discovered that the travel time is the same as what ETN says (or higher with a docking computer). This particular number is useless. A real trade route goes back and forth between stations, not just one way. A back-and-forth route may have around twice as much time to travel back and forth, thus reducing the estimated profit/hour by nearly half. The time estimation is especially unhelpful in that the AB portion may be shorter or longer than the BA portion: AB could be same amount of jumps but the station is 1000 LS further. Supercruise is the majority of the time spent in a trade route.
Seriously consider using the "return" trip in the profit/hour calculation.
And second, there is a bug in a route that I found. It says 19.58 million credits/hour but the sell price is horrendously incorrect (3100cr off). I can't update it with the EDMC. I thought I found the best route I have ever seen by a long shot, but nope.
I tested this by travelling between point A and point B, one way, in a palladium route and discovered that the travel time is the same as what ETN says (or higher with a docking computer). This particular number is useless. A real trade route goes back and forth between stations, not just one way. A back-and-forth route may have around twice as much time to travel back and forth, thus reducing the estimated profit/hour by nearly half. The time estimation is especially unhelpful in that the AB portion may be shorter or longer than the BA portion: AB could be same amount of jumps but the station is 1000 LS further. Supercruise is the majority of the time spent in a trade route.
Seriously consider using the "return" trip in the profit/hour calculation.
And second, there is a bug in a route that I found. It says 19.58 million credits/hour but the sell price is horrendously incorrect (3100cr off). I can't update it with the EDMC. I thought I found the best route I have ever seen by a long shot, but nope.
Nice work! On first impressions, the Trade / Route / Ship menus being aligned to the right led me to infer that they were unrelated to the main search box, because they weren't grouped with it visually. But after clicking around a little, it made sense. The trade route visualisation is great! So stretchy and springy 
Glad the data is accurate.
A return trip is just one example of a trade loop, one with two stops. Often the most profitable trade loop involves three or more stops. ETN is quite capable of finding these. Check "trade loops only" in the route menu to limit results to trade loops.
It sounds like bad data. What is the station and commodity? I can fix it and check the filtering.
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Nice work! On first impressions, the Trade / Route / Ship menus being aligned to the right led me to infer that they were unrelated to the main search box, because they weren't grouped with it visually. But after clicking around a little, it made sense. The trade route visualisation is great! So stretchy and springy
Glad you like the site. I'll move the menus over. Good idea.
Awesome tool. Great work man.
I think I should clarify what I said.
The data is precise but not accurate. The travel time data and therefore the profit per hour is actually only considering one way there in the entire equation which I personally checked. For example, if my route said 12 million per hour, the actual profit per hour would be nearly half of that. My tests ended up with 50-54% of that actual profit it calculated. My in-game trader friends also note that the profit per hour is just totally misleading.
So your data is basing the entire profit per hour calculation off of this:
A-------------->B
When it should use the following for one trip then find how many trips you can take per hour.
A-------------->B------------->A
You misunderstood this as well. I meant consider adding in that return trip time into the profit per hour equation. It doesn't matter if loop trades are more profitable, the site is simply disregarding a return trip in the formula.
This was fixed a couple days after I posted. I have no idea what happened but at least it's fixed!
And finally, don't think I dislike ETN. It's amazing and when used in conjunction with EDDB for system finding it's truly powerful.
I'm glad ETN has a place in your toolbox. It sounds like you want the profit / hour for all trips shown to be sustainable. The fact that going from A -> B gives 12 million / hour is worthless to you because the trip only takes 20 minutes and you can't maintain that high rate of profit. You can add the return journey but that only gives 6 million / hour sustained.
For a trip to be sustainable and that actual profit / hour figure to be achievable, it has to include the return journey. In other words... it needs to be a loop. There are two ways you can restrict results to loops in ETN:
1. set the same source and destination or
2. use the "trade loops only" option
If it is profitable to fly from A -> B and complete the loop (B -> A) with an empty return trip, ETN will show this option. However in my experience flying with an empty hold usually isn't efficient so that result likely won't be listed.
Do either of the loop options work for you? If not, why not?
The reason why routes do not include the return trip by default is that sometimes people don't want to do the return trip. They just want to go from A -> B and make the most profit / hour on the way there.
I've debated enabling "trade loops only" by default. Would that help?
I just deployed a new version. Changes:
1. Add new ships from 1.4 beta
2. Improve optimized ship builds (pick your ship and follow the E Shipyard or Coriolis links to see the default optimized builds)
3. Code restructure for full-galaxy search (in development)
4. Fix bug where old bogus data wasn't getting cleared out promptly when new data came in.
5. Add update notification and refresh button for future updates.
6. Left-justify the menus.
1. Add new ships from 1.4 beta
2. Improve optimized ship builds (pick your ship and follow the E
Shipyard or Coriolis links to see the default optimized builds)3. Code restructure for full-galaxy search (in development)
4. Fix bug where old bogus data wasn't getting cleared out promptly when new data came in.
5. Add update notification and refresh button for future updates.
6. Left-justify the menus.
This is certainly of the most interesting looking tools, I'll give you that.
Gave it a try a little while ago, told me to take slaves to station X, I did so and got a 500,000cr fine! LOL! Ah well, crowd-sourced data. C'est la vie, hehehe
Over all it was pretty accurate so no complaints from me. Good work.
Gave it a try a little while ago, told me to take slaves to station X, I did so and got a 500,000cr fine! LOL! Ah well, crowd-sourced data. C'est la vie, hehehe
Over all it was pretty accurate so no complaints from me.
Good work.
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neat tool thanks, the most profit per ton seems to be about 3000 creds which is makes buying the anaconda for example one hell of a grind, do wish trading profits were more generous.......... @frontierdev
The loop option does indeed change the profit per hour to the correct amount. However, the default options makes it seem like a loop trade would give double of what it actually will give. The 13.61 million per hour number on one of my trades exists in zero actual situations. It's an imaginary number that can't exist and is fairly misleading. The trade I told it to calculate only includes two systems (A-B).
Enabling trade loop by default would get rid of that impossible profit/hr number.
Those profit / hour numbers on non-looping trades are not imaginary. They are accurate profit rates for the routes specified, for the duration of the route. Think of it like a 60 mph speed limit on a one-way 10 mile road. You can go 60 mph on it for 10 minutes. You can't go a full 60 miles and a full hour, but you can still travel at a rate of 60 miles / hour.
I'll look at ways to make this less confusing.
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This is certainly of the most interesting looking tools, I'll give you that.
Gave it a try a little while ago, told me to take slaves to station X, I did so and got a 500,000cr fine! LOL! Ah well, crowd-sourced data. C'est la vie, hehehe
Over all it was pretty accurate so no complaints from me.
Do you remember which station gave you the fine? I'd like to correct the data.
I'm sorry I'm afraid I don't, I wasn't paying attention to station names.
