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Up Topic Public Area / Public Board / TGFT Trading Tips for Newbies -- Part 1
- By tsreknor (Commander / Trident Captain) Date 2009-12-07 23:02
Welcome to the world of profit, Trader! You have chosen a noble profession. The Guild of Free Traders wishes you well in your pursuit of riches and offers the following advice in the hopes that you will join us among the wealthiest of the wealthy in Vendetta-Online (VO).

VO allows players to buy and sell ships, weapons and other add-ons, commodities and ore. All of these transactions occur when docked at stations. The buy and sell prices of items vary from one station to another, and the basic concept is to buy low and sell high.

Price Discovery
===============

If you knew the buy and sell price of every item at every station, profitable trading would be simple. However, when beginning the game, you do not know any prices at all. Therefore, a trader's work is primarily price discovery. The more you know about prices throughout the VO universe, the greater your profitability. Accordingly, the trader's greatest asset is the ability to compile clear, detailed price data.

Let us begin by supposing that you have already run a few missions, can buy an Atlas, have a modest bank account, and are docked at Dau L-10 (UIT Capitol). You wish to buy something that is for sale at that station, load up your Atlas with it (32-cu capacity) and sell it at a higher price somewhere else, perhaps another station in Dau.

To simplify the discussion, let us suppose you wish to trade commodities. (The principles are the same if you are trading anything else.) You go to Commerce/Commodities/Buy in your PDA and are presented with a bewildering list of 34 items. What to buy and where to go with it?

Let us assume that, in most cases, items with high purchase prices are likely to have commensurately high sale prices and therefore earn the most profit. While this is not always true, the tendency is in this direction, and it is as good a rule as any for narrowing down your selections and starting on the road to price discovery.

Let us load 1 unit each of as many items as we can into our Atlas and go shopping with it. If we don't have enough cash to fill it up, a partial load will do, although the price discovery process will then take longer. We are not going to sell this load, just fly it around and see what prices we can obtain at other stations. We can call this type of price discovery load a "price Atlas." We buy the following items at Dau L-10:

1 unit (1 cu) Rare Book
1 unit (5 cu) Fine furniture
1 unit (3 cu) Phase Array
1 unit (1 cu) Luxury Goods
1 unit (1 cu) Organic Solvents
1 unit (1 cu) Dau Spices
1 unit (3 cu) Stabilizing Systems
1 unit (1 cu) Civilian Textiles
1 unit (1 cu) Dau Wine
1 unit (1 cu) Corrosive Chemicals
1 unit (3 cu) Oxygen Recycling System
1 unit (1 cu) NanoPigments
1 unit (3 cu) Cooling Systems
1 unit (1 cu) Synth Wood
1 unit (1 cu) Vismetal
1 unit (3 cu) Basic Targeting Systems
1 unit (1 cu) XiRite Alloy
1 unit (1 cu) Simple PLastics
1 unit (1 cu) Volatile Chemicals

Now that we are loaded up, we launch into space, but stop immediately upon leaving the station, without jumping to another sector. Now hit the "j" key, used to jettison cargo. We are not going to actually jettison anything, we just want to examine the list that the jettison display presents to us.

The Jettison Cargo display shows us, not only what items we are carrying, but the best sale price available for each item within the present system (Dau). For example, we learn that our 4 units of Fine Furniture will sell for a profit of 412 cr per cu at Dau G-11, should we decide to go there. We write down each of the "Best price" values, and we have now created the beginning of a master price database, without even docking at another station.

Perhaps there are even better prices available outside Dau. Let us investigate this possibility. The adjoining systems are Arta Caelestis, Nyrius and Azek. It will require only a few minutes to fly our price Atlas into each of these systems and write down the same data for each one. We don't have to dock anywhere, just fly through the wormhole into the next system. While we are at it, we might as well take a few more minutes and fly into Verasi also, completing the tour of UIT space with our price Atlas load of Dau L-10 items.

At this point, we have made much progress. We have a matrix of best prices for 19 items in 5 systems, i.e. 95 possible trades from Dau L-10, most of them profitable. Now we select one that we like, unload our price Atlas cargo to storage at Dau L-10, buy a full load of the item that we have selected, fly to the indicated station, sell it all there, and collect our profit. What could be easier?

Now we look at the Buy list at our new station, and we see that a completely different set of items is offered, some of which were unavailable at Dau L-10. We load up a price Atlas based on this new list of items, fly it around as before, select a trade, and fly to yet another station, writing down the price data as we go. This process can be repeated ad infinitum, or at least until we have exhausted all of the trade possibilities in UIT space, which is a great number of trades.

We have now learned a great deal. We have a quite voluminous compendium of price data, so much, in fact, that organizing it intelligently is becoming an issue. And we have only visited UIT space! UIT space has 5 systems, and there are 30 systems in the entire VO universe. Clearly, if we are going to become an intrepid trader, we have a great amount of work still to do.

How much profit can you reasonably expect to make? By the time you have a reasonably complete data set for three systems or more, you should seldom make less than 500 cr per cu profit. The better nation-space trades range between about 700 and 1100 cr per cu. There are a few exceptional trades above 3000 cr per cu.

At this point, it is obvious how advantageous it would be to have a buddy to share the load of data gathering and organizing. In fact, three buddies would be really helpful. With four players working cooperatively and sharing data, one could be assigned to work each of UIT, Itani, Serco and grey space. The combined data resources of these players would become truly awesome. Such a group of buddies could even form themselves into a guild and ... ah ... errm ... well, you get the idea.

Trade Assistant
===============

How nice it would be to have a tool that would organize all of our data! That is where TGFT's Trade Assistant (TA) plug-in comes in handy. The current version of TA, created by the inimitable Moda Messolus, can be found at VO Forum thread http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/9/19302. TA automatically acquires price data at every station you dock at and records it in a database on your local disk. It complements the game engine's "j" tool.

TA has two tabs, "Trade Goods" and "Stations," both displaying data based on where you have been and what you have carried there. TA stores prices for all items that you have on board your ship or in storage at a station every time you dock. The plug-in performs this operation in background, with no action required on your part.

Under "Trade Goods," TA displays buy and sell prices for each item at each station. This list can be used to pick a station at which to buy or sell an item. The "Stations" tab allows you to choose pairs of stations and select profitable trades between those two locations. Persistent rumors that TA is the basis of an in-house trade tool used by TGFT are ... errm ... rumors.

The above suggestions should form the basis for you to became a very profitable trader. If you stop reading here, you will have much of the foundation information that a good trader needs. However, there are a few more things that are worth knowing, so kindly continue click on Part 2 and read further.
- By Michael Date 2015-12-18 16:25
Nice way u got of errm....hinting?
Up Topic Public Area / Public Board / TGFT Trading Tips for Newbies -- Part 1

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