BUY! BUY! SELL! SELL! HORSE! COW!
Finally, a chance to be in control of your own destiny. That means there’s money to be made, but you can also get into trouble now too. Trading concepts are covered in detail in the FIG, and are pretty much common sense. Buy low, sell high. Increase your Merchant rating and your personal bankroll at the same time. Sounds easy, right?
Well, it can be. The first thing to consider is buying a larger ship. The larger the ship, the more bays you can transport at once. If you find good prices, it may be worth hauling multiple bays from one place to another and selling them at once. Of course, you have to have enough cash to buy a new ship as well, so you may be hauling one bay at a time in your harrier for a little while. New ships can be purchased in Sol, or on most player planets. Some planets offer a -10% discount, which will mean your ship will be cheaper than Sol prices.
Also, some planets have ship registries – use DI REGISTRY to see who – and those planets with many ships in their fleet often offer discounts or other incentives to get you to purchase ships on their planet. The reason is this – planet owners get an efficiency boost in their exchange for every 10 ships in their fleet; factory owners on those planets also get an efficiency boost. If you see a registry with 9 (or 19 or 29, etc) ships, it may be worth contacting the owner of that planet to ask where to buy a ship on his or her planet – that 10th ship means a boost for the planet economy, and the PO may be grateful enough to work with you in the future when you are looking for futures, factories, or more. It never hurts to be polite and helpful all at once, does it?
There are several things you can do with slithies at this level. If you want to be able to check prices from outside of a planet’s exchange, there are three levels of the price checker available for slithies. And perhaps more importantly, you can buy a warehouse permit, the value of which I will explain in a minute. As always, it is a personal choice whether or not to buy the slithy toves to make these purchases.
Warehouses – to have or not to have. There is no real need for warehouses at the merchant level. The benefit of warehouses come in later, when you promote to Industrialist. They are not cheap, but the reward later on can be significant depending on your strategy. Here’s why: every warehouse you buy now converts into a depot upon promotion to Industrialist. Not only do they cost less than depots (thus saving you 35% from purchasing new depots later on), but the truly great benefit is that for each warehouse you own, you get an additional 10 shares in your company when you promote to Industrialist. If you don’t know why that’s a big deal, read the Industrialist section.
Another benefit to warehouses is that you can store goods, leave them there until you become an Industrialist, and then sell the goods directly from the depot to the exchange. The difference between selling at Merchant and at Indy – the money goes to the company balance instead of your personal balance. So, if you can store cheaply-bought high-value goods in a warehouse at Merchant, you can make some immediate profit for your company. Now, when you promote to Indy, the conversion of each warehouse to a depot costs your company 500Kig, so your company takes an initial hit, but if you empty those depots and sell the ones you don’t need, you recoup the 500Kig for each sold depot, so in the end, it balances out. You can keep the depots you do need, and save 350Kig by purchasing them as a warehouse.
In the interests of keeping the peace, it is important to keep in mind that POs often set their exchanges to pay top dollar for commodities which factories on their planet produce. I’m not making this point so that you can find a planet with a nanofabrics factory and dump your nanfab there at a good price. I’m making this point because it is considered extremely bad form (often punishable by exiling) to sell commods to a player planet exchange when the planet has a factory producing that commod. Unfortunately, that can sometimes make life more difficult for an up-and-coming Merchant, but it is better to avoid problems with FOs and POs now.
Remember, the most expensive commods are not always the best commods with which you can make a profit. For example, if you can buy 6 bays of rads averaging 420/ton, and sell each at an average of 620/ton, you’ll make an average of 200/ton. If you buy 6 bays of woods averaging 650/ton, and sell the first bay at 950/ton but the price drops rapidly and you only average 840/ton, you’ll make 190/ton average. Simple math, I know. The point is, find stable prices. That, and realize that the more you sell at one time to a single exchange, the lower the price usually goes (the same concept applies in reverses for buying – simply, the laws of supply and demand apply).
By spreading out the number of bays you buy and/or sell at a single exchange at one time, you can usually keep your profits higher. And as you get used to the exchanges, you’ll find out which commods tend to have more stable prices and which ones can change rapidly. Player planets can be more stable for commods you want to buy when there are large stockpiles. Sol planets have a maximum stockpile of around 700. Player planets can go up to 19,900 tons for sale. However, the most a player planet will usually buy before stockpiling is 7 bays. Most POs do not want more than 4-6 bays of a commod sold to their exchange at any one time since more bays often risks a situation where half of the bay is immediately consumed by the planet (see the PO section for more information).
Now, at this level, you can usually make plenty of cash on profitable trades, and by the time you reach a high enough Merchant Rating, you’ll have more than enough cash on hand for Trader. So, unless you are spending that cash (on warehouses, for example), don’t worry about making a huge profit, just make sure your profit is high enough to trigger the merchant rating increase.
This guide has been written by Desaxman. 
Please direct any enquiries to desaxman13ATsection3vballDOTcom