Profits are marked

[GameWarrior2216]

What does it mean exactly? I got the Trade perk at lvl25 and it says profits are marked and noticed that the prices on my inventory changed colors but I'm not sure what they mean.

[Vane]

Green numbers on the left means it's good to buy. Later You'll get a perk that'll mark what's good to sell on the right side.
So, I'm guessing, "profits are marked" means "if it's green you'll make a profit"

[GameWarrior2216]

That's what I thought but I remember I bought an item in the green on the left in one city but then in another town the price had doubled for it. When I put my mouse over it, the pop up shows the price in red meaning good to sell but the same price that's on the right is a light orange. Another item I got for free is sometimes in red, meaning no profit? I don't get it.

[Cleftin Twain]

It's a little confusing but basically you just want to monitor the right side. Green means it's good to sell. I'm not sure if right side is working correctly but it may be. Again green on left is supposed to be good to buy but I'm not sure how that's determined.

The Green on the right seems to be green and (this applies to both sides) the shade of green indicates how far away from the original price is. So bright green means you're making a good profit, while light shades show a profit but may not be by much, and then obviously shades going towards red are bad or at a loss.

[GameWarrior2216]

I uploaded two pics to try to make things clearer: https://imgur.com/a/UWqFtfq

Is it profitable based on the item or based on numerical value? Meaning if something bought at 5 sold for 10 changes the color vastly or bought for 5 sold for 100 changes color drastically?

[Atomicbean]

Alright, I'm not sure how the smithing fix patch changed this, as all of my trade leveling was done prior to 1.2. But here's how it worked in 1.1.

When you buy a trade item from a town, the game registers the price you bought it for.
If you sell THAT item, it will have a color based on the profit compared with when you bought it, red is a loss, green is profit.
HOWEVER
This is 100% reset when you reload the game, and every single item in your inventory is unable to provide trade exp any more, and thus won't be marked as "profitable", even if you bought it from a town.

Anything, and I do mean anything, that wasn't bought from a town/caravan, isn't tracked at all.
If you loot a thing of butter from a bandit lair, it won't tell you if that's above or below the average or give you trade exp for selling it.
If you get a spear from a battle, same thing.
But if you buy literally anything from a town, and sell it in another town for more, you ~should~ get trade exp, and it ~should~ be marked profitable or not if it is.
(though I'm not really sure if weapons/armor actually give trade exp, as their price is so static I never bothered doing any testing with them.)

Yes, this means you can buy out everything from a town, then resell half of it back to them and get trade exp for it, though you'll still lose money. Worth it when you have 1.8M and are just trying to level your trade skill like I was though <.< (talking single items here. Buy 500 grain, sell them back 200ish for a "profit")

Yes, I'm pretty sure at exceedingly high levels trade breaks into an infinite loop where you can just repeatedly buy and sell the same item. Pretty sure it requires an absurdly high trade level though, as the trade modifier really doesn't scale that much from leveling trade. (160-something and it's only at like 24% iirc)