Profit collapse?

[TomoRosso]

Has anyone else experienced a substantial reduction in normal commodity trading profit? Had a nice 270k round trip going that's suddenly lost about 60k. I've noticed this happen before when I was doing a Palladium run between LHS 3447 and Eravate, though at the time I thought the increase was connected to the fire sale LHS was having at the time.

[Brightside]

Yep, I found this.

You've got to work hard to turn a profit and hit those luxury traders for every penny they have when they show up.

The most I've managed to get off a two station round trip recently was 1450/ton, however I did have a route across 5 stations in 4 systems that made me 3000/ton but it took almost an hour to run.

If you find luxury traders in a system with a starport selling Performance Enhances are a good price you can make a lot of money. For almost a week I was taking 970/ton profit in the [redacted] system (boom state has ended though )

[Roger Wilco Jr]

I just tried 3 round trips and profit is up for me - so far. All day yesterday I was making 685k per trip. Today:
Trip 1 = 807k
Trip 2 = 799k
Trip 3 = 752k (a little lower due to carrying fuel scoop).

The outbound leg from station to outpost was up over 50%, but the return leg remained the same each time.
All commodities were high supply to high demand.

So overall I'm up, but it is dropping. Hopefully it will only drop in small amounts and then go back up tomorrow.

***edit***
Here's an update. Yesterday, I was making 1523/T for gold and 1513/T for palladium, no matter what quantities I carried, so I went with 100% gold. I just tried varying the quantities again and found that I still get 1523/T for gold if I carry 100% gold, but if I carry both, I get 1525/T for gold and 1725/T for palladium. But if I carry 100% palladium I get something much less, like 1269/T, but I don't remember the exact number. Also, you have to play with ratios to get the maximum profit. So I'm going with 80T gold and 212T palladium for an extra 43Kcr or 9.6% profit on each inbound leg.

In general, I find it almost always better to carry 2 commodities rather than a single commodity. The lower quantity commodity may have a smaller profit, but by having it the profit on the larger quantity will be much larger, so overall the profit is 10's of Kcr higher each trip.


-Cheers

[Andrew Gaspurr]

I've seen the buy prices of Imperial Slaves, Performance Enhancers, Palladium and Gold drop in the Tenche, Watiya and WW Piscis areas drop. There's a thread monster in the official forums where most folks tend to attribute this to a Luxury Trader and overall trading "nerf" by FD. Some seem to think Trading's gonna suffer somewhat in preparation for the 1.1 Community Goals, where people expect the new cash cow will lie.

[Commiekaze]

The economy was fixed. The supply and demand numbers are now working as intended. That is the fluctuation you are experiencing.

[Amun-Ra]

I'm surprised supply/demand was broken for as long as it was (about 3 weeks). I think very profitable routes with broken supply/demand became widely known and naturally collapsed when the bug was fixed. I haven't done a comparison of a private route yet, but I suspect things have just gone back to the way they were a month ago.

To find out if a route is public, check the traffic stats (are you the only person visiting the system?) and see if the system shows up in crowd sourced tools.

[TomoRosso]

At the time it happened I didn't know they had patched the supply/demand, makes sense now.

[Plak]

I did run Dvorsi - Ling Deti with Performance Enhancers.
Since Ling Deti is a small system the demand there was about 250. The first time I dumped 100 Performance Enhancers in Ling Deit I was able to get 1130/ton. The second time I dumped the profit was 3000 for the whole 100 units.

The supply and demand now seem to have a real effect on the prices. The only problem with that is that the price does not reflect that right away. The prices seem to only be calculated roughly once every half hour. So you have to anticipate the pricedrop depending on how much you saturated the market because the demand will go down right away for that station, but the price will stay up for some time and then be adjusted down later.

Befor the patch the and the demand would stay quite high for my whole evening session and it really got boring at some point.
I like the new system way more and have adapted to it.

I usually start with a trade route of around 2000/ton round trip and pick up all demand missions that seem lucrative on all stations I visit. Then once the profit for that route drops I start going around and buying the mission items all the while trading with lower profit/ton with my left free cargo hold.
This way I can net around 2 million in a 2-4 hour session.

I tend to stay around Azrael for my traderoutes right now and I use RegulatedNoise (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=86908 and https://github.com/stringandstickytape/ ... e/releases) to help me find good deals. I do not use EDDN data for my trading, just my own screenshots. This is just so I do not get data that is to far away from where I am.

[Andrew Gaspurr]

I run Performance Enhancers in an Independent backwater system and I witnessed the price adjustment when the station generates a new supply batch, regardless of how many PE I bought before. The supply intervals seem to be like an hour or so and the price increase was some odd 1% each time.

[Zanten]

My more direct route went down, but my roundabout route (relatively speaking) actually went up in profit by a bit over a hundred credits per ton. o.O Not much, but surprising given it was rock steady beforehand. We'll have to see how long that lasts, though, the route is in the vicinity of Maridal, and the region seems fairly popular.