Guide / Tutorial Yokai's guide to recognizing (and finding) a great trade route

[Yokai]

I checked several stations and never found something worth the time until I noticed that the sun was going down and I had wasted a whole afternoon searching for a trade route, when in fact I could have made 2.6 million credits by just running my regular rare trade route with my 80 tons Asp once back and forth.

So my question stands: Is this really worth the time you have to put in to actually find a place to start regular trading?

Rares have the advantage that they spawn for every CMDR individually, so no other CMDR in the system will diminish your supply.

If I find a regular trade route, though... (probably after days of searching that I could have spent better making money), how long can I run it until it dries up? I want to fly a 200 ton Clipper.

A rare trade route guarantees profit. It takes longer, yes, but the profit is worth it. I just don't see this system working out for me.

The OP clearly stated "discard anything below a very large or huge population". So any normally "Large" population is to be discarded. I did exactly that.

BTW: I am currently in Pandamonium, a "wealthy, huge population agricultural/industrial economy".

All commodities are in medium supply. So apparently, population size says nothing about supply and demand in 1.104.



As long as I won't be able to access the latest available commodity market overview for each station via the system map, I am not going to hunt for trade routes.

It takes up way too much time and is extremely frustrating.

I'm sorry you find the standard commodity trading process frustrating. If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. If it's any incentive to use the guide as a starting point for _your own understanding and your own techniques that work for you_, consider the following:

* I don't know how many hours in ED constitute "a day" for you, but you quoted that you make 2.6 million cr "per day" by doing rares trading in your Asp.
* Assuming you find a commodity route that is worth 12,000 cr/ton/hour (easily doable), that's 120 x 12,000 = 1,400,000 cr/hour. If you find one of the better commodity routes, you're looking at more like 120 x 16,000 = 1,920,000 cr/hour.

Only you can decide if making 1.9 million per hour in your Asp is "worth" the time to figure out how to find a good commodity route.

I'll point out one other thing. If you're making 2.6 million in rares trading per day, _clearly_ you looked up somebody's pet rare trading guide and followed or strung together one or more of the canned rares routes that are publicized in various places. If you're not a purist and don't mind using out-of-game approaches to making money, why not use a tool like Slopey's or TradeDangerous to find good commodity routes a little easier and faster than flying around to a bunch of candidate systems.

The 3rd party tools are based on crowdsourced data, much of which is often more than 2 days out of date and therefore suspect. You'll still have to do some flying around and checking things in person for yourself, but the tools are the equivalent of hundreds of copies of yourself actually flying around to various stations and checking prices. The tools also do some basic number crunching for you, making it easy to see the exact (last reported) profit for commodity XYZ from station A sold at station B. The principles in the guide will still help you weed out the bad data and the less-likely candidates even from the third party tools.

My preference is Slopey's not only because I like the workflow of their UI and their clean integration with EliteOCR, but primarily because they make it easy to automatically delete all data older than 2 days. If the prices were reported more than 2 days ago, you can't trust it. So right there, Slopey's tool saves you a LOT of time by weeding out "bad" data. You still have to apply some common sense and filtering (using the concepts from the guide), but at first it can be easier than poring through in-game Galaxy maps and System Maps and clicking on each station and _still_ not being sure what commodities are at that station and at what price.

All I can do is encourage you to wrap your head around the process and find the tools/workflow that works for you. If you want to stick with the limited income flow of rares trading, it will slow down getting into the larger ships if that's your goal. On the other hand, if you're happy with Asps and smaller ships, power to ya.

 

[Yokai]

I have updated the guide in the OP with some new/improved information:

* I changed Rule 11 slightly
* I added Rule 12
* I changed Step 4 to more clearly leverage the guidelines in Rules 11 and 12.

Essentially, the guide wasn't clear enough that it's the supply quantity (the actual number) that matters much more than the labels HIGH, MEDIUM, or LOW.

 

[Reithan]

You are awesome. Bookmark'd and rep'd.

 

[InMemoriamSirocco]

I'm sorry you find the standard commodity trading process frustrating. If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. If it's any incentive to use the guide as a starting point for _your own understanding and your own techniques that work for you_, consider the following:

* I don't know how many hours in ED constitute "a day" for you, but you quoted that you make 2.6 million cr "per day" by doing rares trading in your Asp.
* Assuming you find a commodity route that is worth 12,000 cr/ton/hour (easily doable), that's 120 x 12,000 = 1,400,000 cr/hour. If you find one of the better commodity routes, you're looking at more like 120 x 16,000 = 1,920,000 cr/hour.

Only you can decide if making 1.9 million per hour in your Asp is "worth" the time to figure out how to find a good commodity route.

I'll point out one other thing. If you're making 2.6 million in rares trading per day, _clearly_ you looked up somebody's pet rare trading guide and followed or strung together one or more of the canned rares routes that are publicized in various places. If you're not a purist and don't mind using out-of-game approaches to making money, why not use a tool like Slopey's or TradeDangerous to find good commodity routes a little easier and faster than flying around to a bunch of candidate systems.

The 3rd party tools are based on crowdsourced data, much of which is often more than 2 days out of date and therefore suspect. You'll still have to do some flying around and checking things in person for yourself, but the tools are the equivalent of hundreds of copies of yourself actually flying around to various stations and checking prices. The tools also do some basic number crunching for you, making it easy to see the exact (last reported) profit for commodity XYZ from station A sold at station B. The principles in the guide will still help you weed out the bad data and the less-likely candidates even from the third party tools.

My preference is Slopey's not only because I like the workflow of their UI and their clean integration with EliteOCR, but primarily because they make it easy to automatically delete all data older than 2 days. If the prices were reported more than 2 days ago, you can't trust it. So right there, Slopey's tool saves you a LOT of time by weeding out "bad" data. You still have to apply some common sense and filtering (using the concepts from the guide), but at first it can be easier than poring through in-game Galaxy maps and System Maps and clicking on each station and _still_ not being sure what commodities are at that station and at what price.

All I can do is encourage you to wrap your head around the process and find the tools/workflow that works for you. If you want to stick with the limited income flow of rares trading, it will slow down getting into the larger ships if that's your goal. On the other hand, if you're happy with Asps and smaller ships, power to ya.

I appreciate you taking the time to answer me in such detail. Thank you for that.

I know that once I find a profitable commodity trade route, I will make credits faster than with rare trading. But if I use any crowdsourced tool, chances are that others have found the exact same system I am trying to trade in, too. So the profits will diminish (if they have not yet diminished when I arrive) and I will be back to square one.

Other than rare trading, I don't see any persistent trade routes (as would be realistic in an interstellar economy) like they used to exist in Elite 2 and 3, for instance.

I find it highly unlikely that the endless hunger for consumer goods on the luxurious population of Earth, for example, can be saturated by simply a few dozen ships with 500 tons maximum capacity each.

Frankly, commodity trading in ED is just disappointing to me. The dynamic markets are far too unstable to represent the economies of whole planets.

 

[Caspar]

Excellent guide. It answers many of my questions.

 

[xl-jedi]

@xj-jedi: You make a good point but I sidestep commodity trading below T6/Asp by recommending "rares routes" until you're in a T6 or better. Even then, depending on your success at applying the guide it can be a toss-up during the T6/Asp phase whether you'll make more cash per hour continuing rares routes or switching over to pure commodity trading. At T7/Clipper and larger ships, the money is definitely in commodity trading. That said, I never actually did rares trading. Not one single rares route; ever. I still did very well in Hauler and up. Only the Sidewinder > Hauler felt like a real slog. It's hard to get the snowball rolling at first.

In any ship that isn't fitted with an FSD that will get you 19-20 LYs/jump the rares routes are absolutely painful.
I would probably recommend using your method from day one to work into a hauler... stick with the hauler and your method til you can pickup a cobra, then get on to the rares routes a bit. ...as soon as you get 1.6M upgrade the cobra FSD to the type A4 and then the rares routes start to workout OK.

I have to admit, I kinda pieced together my own rares router tool in Excel to do it though. I shortened the routes considerably to better accommodate the 40t cargo space, think my route was only like 5 or 6 stops and maybe 25-ish jumps total with an A4 FSD. I use the X,Y,Z coordinates of the rares planets to calc the max distance in the route to each rare commodity so I can maximize time:return ratio.

BTW, your points on flying skills and timing, first thing that came to mind when I read that was to take the player skill level out of your equation. Think the focus of your equation should be on minimized distance to the trade port, rather than muddle it with a timer dependent on something subjective like player flight skill. The flying skills will come as they play...

 

[Yokai]

I have added a "Rule 13" section to the OP. It explains how the seemingly-arbitrary price fluctations you see are not arbitrary at all, but instead follow a logical pattern.

 

[ajwm]

Yokai, I just stumbled upon this thread and just wanted to say thanks. Your a gem. Great help in my trading career.

 

[Skymax]

I worked hard to get a Type9 and when I did it barked!

 

[Herethos]

I'm currently doing rare runs in my cobra picking up all the rares I can find in a cluster then moving on to the next cluster. As we know, we only get a couple of tons of rares in a system before its dried up. I've now also started filling my cargohold with commodities that I take to the next system which spawns the rares, and sell the commodities in the next system and grab its rares, which pretty much equals free rares from the commodities sold, just repeat for the next system until the cargohold is only filled with rares. Why drive around with available cargo space. I've got a T6 transport docked somewhere, just grinding a few more million credits with the cobra with a A4 FSD to equip the best FSD in the T6. Then I'll probably repeat what I'm doing but with the T6.

 

[Deleted member 58533]

I found a trade route for performance enhancers that gave me 36k per route, which is just three jumps away and the stations near the jump (one 5ls away, the other 150ls). Each round-trip takes about 10 or 15 minutes or so, including fuel scooping. That's almost 200k per hour. And this in a Cobra with 32T cargo space. The profit was somewhat above 1100cr per unit (IIRC, the route was from Meredith City to Silves Dock; around 26ly apart or such.)

I did three trips, then I got bored to death and went back to missions and shooting stuff. I cannot imagine how people are able to play that way :-/ If you enjoy that stuff, you should seriously look into getting a warehouse records clerk position... Has to be your dream job.

"Warehouse records clerk" .. Hilarious!..

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@Yokai & Vjek- great posts. Very informative and helped immensely! Thanks,

 

[Skymax]

That's because you're piddling 200,000 an hour isn't worth the time spent getting it.
With a Type9 I make 2 million an hour and its only One 3 minute jump each time.
You Bounty guys don't think big enough, that's why you will never own a capital ship like the Anaconda.

 

[moqui]

Just wanted to leave my kudos, thank you good sir! Thanks to your guide I managed to find a decent 2-jump round trip yielding ~ 13.670 cr/ton/hour

 

[Arksun]

That's because you're piddling 200,000 an hour isn't worth the time spent getting it.
With a Type9 I make 2 million an hour and its only One 3 minute jump each time.
You Bounty guys don't think big enough, that's why you will never own a capital ship like the Anaconda.

I've been making 650,000 per hour with a Type6 that only holds 1/5 the max cargo of a Type9, you should be making way more than 2 million an hour in that thing.

 

[Skurrock]

Great guide, many thanks for writing it but...

It, and other quality guides, haven't helped. This week I tried my hand at finding a trade route using this guide and no route I have tried has yielded better than 600cr/hour.
Don't get me wrong, this is NOT a problem with the guide.
The problem is that trading data is not worth the money you pay for it. In the System View a station imports and exports are often not representative of the actual trade data you buy.

This could be down to the trading data not being up to date with the current actual trading but it is really frustrating to dock and see that something being exported is actually in high demand with no supply or that the export to a particular system trades at a loss.

In the time I have spent looking for even a half decent trade route with my fully upgrade Lakon 6, which is at least 3 hours a day and covered many 100's of LY since last Saturday, I could have made a lot more money mining or bounty/combat voucher hunting or even Rares trading in my Cobra.

Maybe I was just unlucky but, for now at least, the trading system gets in the way of trading, which is boring enough, and this part of the game has not been worth the time I have invested in it.
One really big problem with a large part of the area I was searching in was that so many systems are High Tech+Refinery or Industrial/Extraction or other useless combinations where even in-system trading isn't worth the effort.

 

[DrGoo]

I tried trading. I really did. I've spent hours working my way up to an Asp. I do all I can to make supercruise/docking/jumping/etc faster but it's all so tediously slow! My only reward for 5mins of attention is a slight increase in some arbitrary number. And you can't do anything to multi-task! Read a good book, and you will be distracted every minute, thus ruining a good book. Grrr!

So I did maths instead. I currently have an Asp, kinda fitted with class B gear, and 120t of cargo racks. I think I have about $13m to my name, running a route at average $1.7m/hour, equaling $14k/ton/hr. By Yokai's numbers, this seems ok-ish. My next ship is the Type 7, needing an extra $11m. This does not include extra money for cargo and insurance, but does include some kit (FSD, cargo).

$11 million = 6.47 hours

This is just for the next ship, which I don't even want! I want to get to a python so I can burn other pythons! So when I reach the type 7, I would need an extra $49mil. Presuming doubled cargo space and the same route timeframe (10mins, doubtful), my estimates are:

$49mil = 14 hours?

THAT'S 20 MORE HOURS OF WATCHING A BARELY-MOVING SCREEN

FUNNY HOW NO-ONE TELLS YOU THESE THINGS??

World of Warcraft was a more interesting grind. The telly was playing infomercials for a time, and I paid more attention to that. Therefore: Infomercials are more interesting than trading.

Frontier had this fantastic concept and crushed it. I had such high hopes for it too! Hopeless !!

 

[Skurrock]

Great guide, many thanks for writing it but...

It, and other quality guides, haven't helped. This week I tried my hand at finding a trade route using this guide and no route I have tried has yielded better than 600cr/hour.
Don't get me wrong, this is NOT a problem with the guide.
The problem is that trading data is not worth the money you pay for it. In the System View a station imports and exports are often not representative of the actual trade data you buy.

This could be down to the trading data not being up to date with the current actual trading but it is really frustrating to dock and see that something being exported is actually in high demand with no supply or that the export to a particular system trades at a loss.

In the time I have spent looking for even a half decent trade route with my fully upgrade Lakon 6, which is at least 3 hours a day and covered many 100's of LY since last Saturday, I could have made a lot more money mining or bounty/combat voucher hunting or even Rares trading in my Cobra.

Maybe I was just unlucky but, for now at least, the trading system gets in the way of trading, which is boring enough, and this part of the game has not been worth the time I have invested in it.
One really big problem with a large part of the area I was searching in was that so many systems are High Tech+Refinery or Industrial/Extraction or other useless combinations where even in-system trading isn't worth the effort.

Well it turns out that using the elitetradingtool.co.uk tool makes this whole trading thing a lot easier. This is a disappointment because I am not fond of using external tools that do what the game should, at least in part, help you with and having to reach into a browser means a reduction in the immersive experience.
Having said that the advantages of using a tool like the one mentioned vastly outweigh the disadvantages and, let's face it, who wants to be 100% immersed in trade runs anyway.

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I tried trading. I really did. I've spent hours working my way up to an Asp. I do all I can to make supercruise/docking/jumping/etc faster but it's all so tediously slow! My only reward for 5mins of attention is a slight increase in some arbitrary number. And you can't do anything to multi-task! Read a good book, and you will be distracted every minute, thus ruining a good book. Grrr!

So I did maths instead. I currently have an Asp, kinda fitted with class B gear, and 120t of cargo racks. I think I have about $13m to my name, running a route at average $1.7m/hour, equaling $14k/ton/hr. By Yokai's numbers, this seems ok-ish. My next ship is the Type 7, needing an extra $11m. This does not include extra money for cargo and insurance, but does include some kit (FSD, cargo).

$11 million = 6.47 hours

This is just for the next ship, which I don't even want! I want to get to a python so I can burn other pythons! So when I reach the type 7, I would need an extra $49mil. Presuming doubled cargo space and the same route timeframe (10mins, doubtful), my estimates are:

$49mil = 14 hours?

THAT'S 20 MORE HOURS OF WATCHING A BARELY-MOVING SCREEN

FUNNY HOW NO-ONE TELLS YOU THESE THINGS??

World of Warcraft was a more interesting grind. The telly was playing infomercials for a time, and I paid more attention to that. Therefore: Infomercials are more interesting than trading.

Frontier had this fantastic concept and crushed it. I had such high hopes for it too! Hopeless !!

While I sympathise I do feel that the rewards should justify the effort you put in.
If it was easy to get the cash together for a Python then Frontier need not have bothered with the different ways to get cash and the game would have lost a lot of its appeal.

Bored with trading, go bounty hunting or mining or become a pirate or even explore.

 

[DrGoo]

Alrighty, I appreciate your input. I gave it another crack tonight. I just cannot do it.

I'm fully aware that other 'occupations' exist. I bounty hunted in my viper until I had about $6mil, but needed a change. May go back to it in my Asp... ... maybe not ... Mining and exploration do not interest me.

And I'm not saying it should be easy to earn the big ships. Obviously. But for Elite Dangerous, trading is not difficult at all. It's simple. So simple! Shrink the galaxy into 2 systems, buy high, sell low, repeat. The ships practically fly themselves, yet requires constant attention to make minuscule adjustments. It's so lobotomizingly simple.

20 hours of self-imposed lobotomy. Yeah, no.

 

[Skurrock]

Alrighty, I appreciate your input. I gave it another crack tonight. I just cannot do it.

I'm fully aware that other 'occupations' exist. I bounty hunted in my viper until I had about $6mil, but needed a change. May go back to it in my Asp... ... maybe not ... Mining and exploration do not interest me.

And I'm not saying it should be easy to earn the big ships. Obviously. But for Elite Dangerous, trading is not difficult at all. It's simple. So simple! Shrink the galaxy into 2 systems, buy high, sell low, repeat. The ships practically fly themselves, yet requires constant attention to make minuscule adjustments. It's so lobotomizingly simple.

20 hours of self-imposed lobotomy. Yeah, no.

My aim is to earn credits until I don't have to worry about it anymore and simply explore lots.
Until then I can bear the grind.
If you want to liven up the trading grind find trade routes in Anarchy systems and collect bounties as well.

 

[Distance]

I have a tip that makes using the galaxy map faster than scrolling in the nav panel to find the next station on your trade route. At each station on your route just buy a sidewinder. Now when you go to the galaxy map that system will always be displayed and clickable regardless of the zoom level.