EDCT VS ed-price-check

I agree with /u/SkynetGDN but if you are in a hurry the bare minimum is 5.3B for the carrier, refuel, repair, and armory, one week of maintenance and 100M working cash. As soon as you get the carrier you'll need to find a port with large pads selling at least 25Kt Agronomic Treatment for under 3K/t. Jump your carrier there and fill it to capacity. Now find another dock buying at least 30Kt for at least 13K/t, and unload your carrier. You have now made 250M, which is enough to keep the carrier lights on for a few months (your maintenance with RRR is about 10M/week). Also consider getting elite dangerous carrier trader which will help find other potentially profitable routes. WARNING - EDCT is currently broken. don't use it until the 3.0 update comes out.

Unhappily it seems there is only EDCT but this is currently not working and all other trade route planners etc are for normal ships. I understand why it needs a lot compute power so there are no websites. Then I started clicking random commodities in inara/eddb and comparinng all the numbers. I had in mind that some more recent guides suggested Agronomic Treatment but things like Gold, Platinum or Bauxite seemed way more profitable.

Your bare minimum is 5.3B for the carrier, refuel, repair, and armory, one week of maintenance and 100M working cash. Then you'll need to find a port with large pads selling at least 25Kt Agronomic Treatment for under 3K/t. Jump your carrier there and fill it to capacity. Now find another dock buying at least 30Kt for at least 13K/t, and unload your carrier. You have now made 250M, which is enough to keep the carrier lights on for a few months (your maintenance with RRR is about 10M/week). Also consider getting elite dangerous carrier trader which will help find other potentially profitable routes.

For commodity and location, there is a specific tool for it, Elite: Dangerous Carrier Trader, which is also linked in the sidebar.

The information for this trade was gathered by EDCT. You can download the tool here: https://github.com/Fi0x/EDCT/releases/latest.

Right - the tritium cost depends on how far you jump and how full your carrier is. You can use the Fleet Carrier Router to get a close estimate. Normally the first jump is cheaper since you will be empty or nearly empty of cargo. Here's my post on bulk trading. You may also want to get a copy of u/Fi_0x's Carrier Trader Utility

The hardcore traders are monitoring the EDDN feed directly. They get alerts in Discord (or via text message) when commodities sell above thresholds they set. They're monitoring the background simulation (BGS), participating in coordinated market scouting efforts, and even manipulating the BGS to get desirable states like Boom or Public Holiday. They're supporting Powers that give influence or trade bonuses. They have fleet carriers that stockpile desirable commodities, and they're part of squadrons that can completely fulfill a station's demand anywhere in the Bubble in 15 minutes or less. If you want to get the best possible prices for your mined commodities, you need to raise your level of gameplay to match these players.

FDev did some much-needed rebalancing: - a volume discount mechanic steeply reduces your profit margins on trade goods if you have more than about 25% of the station's demand for that good in your inventory - also station commodity demand can be fulfilled, so good luck getting the jump on dedicated carrier-based traders who watch station markets like hawks using tools like ED Alerts or ed-price-check; to beat them, you need to return to your roots—turn off EDDiscovery/EDMC and start scoping out commodity markets at stations that haven't gotten EDDN market updates for at least a month - new tritium hotspots in icy rings (RIP in peace the 3x LTD overlap in the Borann A 2 A ring) - low temperature diamonds got nerfed and rightly so (but this completely screwed up tritium spawn rates, which sucks) - current mining meta is mapped high/haz RES overlapping a platinum or painite hotspot; see r/EliteMiners for details - both PvE combat and AX combat pay a lot better; I've bought three fleet carriers with wing massacre mission payouts - combat XP from Thargoid scouts got nerfed—again, rightly so

The other trick is to write a program that watches the Elite Dangerous Data Network (EDDN) directly. This one is mine. If you search here, r/EliteDangerous, or r/EliteCarriers, you should find a web site that offers a similar service. As soon as someone sends a market update over EDDN that matches your search criteria, you’ll get an alert. That’s how I was finding 325-380k per tonne for platinum with market demand in the thousands. But you have to be quick about it, because everyone else is watching INARA or using that web site’s alerts, too.