Ridiculous trading outlier - megaprofits for polymers.

[Adept]

This is one of the weirdest trading glitches I’ve seen.

Polymers, cheap plastics bought for 50cr/ton bring about 10k profit when sold at high tech. A million / run profit with a type-6 with no investment risk due yo cheap cargo. Makes cargo missions pointless, because just running plastic is more lucrative.

How long has this been going on?

 

[Bigmaec]

This is one of the weirdest trading glitches I’ve seen.

Polymers, cheap plastics bought for 50cr/ton bring about 10k profit when sold at high tech. A million / run profit with a type-6 with no investment risk due yo cheap cargo. Makes cargo missions pointless, because just running plastic is more lucrative.

How long has this been going on?

For a long time. It's just still nothing compared to old mining, so no one cared.

Now I regret to inform you that it's gonna get nerfed though

 

[Factabulous]

Inara says Survival Equipment and Mil Grade Fabrics are even nicer. Once I finally finish offloading this bunch of Hutton Mugs knock-offs I might do some trading

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

This is one of the weirdest trading glitches I’ve seen.

Polymers, cheap plastics bought for 50cr/ton bring about 10k profit when sold at high tech. A million / run profit with a type-6 with no investment risk due yo cheap cargo. Makes cargo missions pointless, because just running plastic is more lucrative.

How long has this been going on?

meanwhile at frontier HQ....

 

[askavir]

To be honest, I think doing trading by yourself using good routes with your own cargo should greatly outpay similar cargo missions where you just need to follow the quest marker with someone else's cargo.

 

[Shiro Akai]

To be honest - for quite some time. Last time (few weeks ago but current year) I was bit surprised that (according to EDDB) most profitable trade loop was the very same Polymer loop I did back in May 2019 when I was on my final push to Trade Elite. Before that, another few months, about a year ago from now, I had some money earning run which involved... Polymers. Sligthly different stations but same area.

6.5M pure profit from a single T-9 loop.
Pennies since everyone were harvesting VO for 1.6M a pop but hey, I blazed my own trail.

 

[Kayvan]

High-paying bulk cargo runs -- been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Polymers is how I filled up the missing last 5% to Trader Elite. Took 4 runs. ^^

The thing is, there are snags with every high paying loop.

Military Fabrics: there is only ONE port that pays top dollar, and it's planetary. The nearest producer is a bit away, so an unengineered heavy freighter will need 2 jumps. And of course the planetary landing and lift-off eats a lot of time. There's nothing useful to ship back, but at least that means you can hustle back in one jump. I did that loop a couple of times but ultimately decided it's too much trouble.

Survival Equipment: also gets high offers from many buyers... but ALWAYS at planetary sites, so I didn't investigate further.

Polymers: Many of the high-paying stations are outposts, so forget them for bulk runs. The Large stations always seem to have their own catch:
Either there is no supplier nearby (minimum 2 jumps), or one involved station is many 1000 Ls out. Or both. And again, there's nothing useful to ship back.

That said, a good Polymer loop is to Carabineri or whatever it's called... Caberani it is. I managed to drop 4 loads in a little over an hour, for some 25 Mil profit in a Type 9.
Then finally the Elite bar was filled up, and I sold that slug the minute I got the message in my inbox. xD

 

[Friedenreich Xante]

You have missed out on Rockforth Fertiliser

jk, you missed nothing. Profits were removed by FD

 

[Kenneth McGrew]

You have missed out on Rockforth Fertiliser

jk, you missed nothing. Profits were removed by FD

missed out on Pirate lord Shike

JK, no one made credits off that...

 

[Retropolitan]

Military Fabrics: there is only ONE port that pays top dollar, and it's planetary. The nearest producer is a bit away, so an unengineered heavy freighter will need 2 jumps. And of course the planetary landing and lift-off eats a lot of time. There's nothing useful to ship back, but at least that means you can hustle back in one jump. I did that loop a couple of times but ultimately decided it's too much trouble.

It's all going to depend on where (and when) you are. A few months ago I did a lot station-to-station runs of Military Grade Fabrics with a jump of around 10LY. Then the faction states changed and it all went away.

 

[Adept]

For a long time. It's just still nothing compared to old mining, so no one cared.

Now I regret to inform you that it's gonna get nerfed though

I should hope it gets nerfed, it's ridiculously stupid.

 

[Adept]

To be honest, I think doing trading by yourself using good routes with your own cargo should greatly outpay similar cargo missions where you just need to follow the quest marker with someone else's cargo.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with there being cargo that nets you 10k / canister. I sure hauled plenty in my Type-9 days. It does need to make sense though, and preferably cost a lot / ton so there's an actual risk involved and things make sense.

Hauling 100 tons of cheap plastic for a million credit payoff (or 3 million / run in a type 7 etc.) juts makes the whole thing a joke.

 

[Stealthie]

For a long time. It's just still nothing compared to old mining, so no one cared.

Now I regret to inform you that it's gonna get nerfed though

This.

CBA doing the math's properly but if we're saying you can earn Cr1m per load in a T6 then, presumably, you can get, say, Cr5m per load in a Cutter?
4 loads an hour is Cr20m per hour - for doing something that's more tedious than mining.
Even with the price of Painite now 60% of what it was, I can still make Cr120m/hr by mining.

 

[Adept]

This.

CBA doing the math's properly but if we're saying you can earn Cr1m per load in a T6 then, presumably, you can get, say, Cr5m per load in a Cutter?
4 loads an hour is Cr20m per hour - for doing something that's more tedious than mining.
Even with the price of Painite now 60% of what it was, I can still make Cr120m/hr by mining.

Again, this is missing the point.

High value haulage needs to make sense. Making 10k/t in high demand for things like progenitor cells or beryllium makes sense, because the hauled stuff is valuable. For plastics it’s just stupid.

The demand spike should also be quick to fill, not one that lasts for days or weeks of heavy haulage.

 

[Stealthie]

Again, this is missing the point.

High value haulage needs to make sense. Making 10k/t in high demand for things like progenitor cells or beryllium makes sense, because the hauled stuff is valuable. For plastics it’s just stupid.

The demand spike should also be quick to fill, not one that lasts for days or weeks of heavy haulage.

I don't mean this to sound snarky (honestly ) but you're the one who's missing the point.

The point being, alas, that because everybody's off mining to earn credits nobody (including the Dev's, apparently) really cares that something less profitable is messed-up.

To address your point, you're absolutely right.
Things that are hard to find, and likely to be troublesome to deliver, should definitely be more valuable than more common items.

I suppose they'll get around to fixing it eventually.

 

[Dagwit]

I ran a few loops recently to earn money for my Cobra's mining equipment, and the best loop eddb offered me involved polymers.

It used to be Imperial Slaves that paid best, but the world has become a lot more censorious in the last few years, and I suspect that someone at Frontier recognised the danger of getting a name as the gaming company that actively encouraged slave trading.

 

[Vandaahl]

Anything else I utterly missed since the start of this game?

 

[Dagwit]

I ran a few loops recently to earn money for my Cobra's mining equipment, and the best loop eddb offered me involved polymers.

It used to be Imperial Slaves that paid best, but the world has become a lot more censorious in the last few years, and I suspect that someone at Frontier recognised the danger of getting a name as the gaming company that actively encouraged slave trading.

It's just occurred to me: polymers must have seemed like a thoroughly harmless alternative at the time. And yet here we are now in a War on Plastics.

 

[777Driver]

Old news... https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/polymers-selling-for-8800-cr-ton.472883/

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The demand spike should also be quick to fill, not one that lasts for days or weeks of heavy haulage.

Polymer pricing spikes are mainly tied to the Investment state. So long as the system is building infrastructure they're going to need materials. That's what makes this unusual - it's one of the highest state effects (about 7x) and all the others that high are tied to short-term states (Outbreak, Pirate Attack, Famine) or caused by combinations of multiple states including at least one short-lived one (Pirate Attack, Expansion) or are for the "salvage" cargo classes (Scientific Research, Rare Artwork, etc.) which are virtually impossible to obtain in large quantities.

Tieing a big price spike solely to Investment state has the problem that Investments are self-reinforcing, and bigger trade profits reinforce them faster. (The 3x spikes that Investment gives for Aluminium and Synthetic Fabrics are not as big a deal as those goods don't have as high a base price, less than half the boost, and have a much smaller baseline profit margin)