How can I tell if a ship's trading is profitable?

[Constans]

I have a ship doing automated local trades but I can't tell if it is profitable or not. I'm looking at the transaction log but it really isn't that helpful. For example, I have a transaction as follows:

- Trade Order +34,713. As I understand it, this is crediting my player account with the value of the goods ordered.

- Trade Purchase -34,713. This is debiting my player account to pay the seller.

- Trade Sale +41,239. This is crediting the ship with the value of the sale.

- Trade Profit -41,239. This is debiting the ship and crediting the value to my player account.

Problem is, "trade profit" isn't profit, it is trade proceeds. The profit is 6,526 (the difference between purchase and sale prices). So, is there any way to find out the overall profitability of a ships activities?

Manually, I searched "profit" in the transaction log, made a note of the total, and then searched "order" and made a note of the total and subtracted the two. Is there an easier way?

Also, once I reassign the ship to a different trade route, is there any way to either clear the old log or limit the search by time stamps? Even the manual method outlined above will be useless then as it will be combining all the ships activities to date.

[conrado.lacerda]

With autotrade, it's always profitable by design.

[VeraelHasta]

As far as I know you can't see for how much the merchant bought things. By design traders only trade when they can profit from it. So what you get is the final result.

The log is from the Merchant perspective. +40 means the merchant got this much profit from the trade, -40 means the merchant forwarded it to your account. At least that is how I understand it.

[The Zanzibarbarian]

I remember that when I was last playing, 18 months ago, I could see a list of all the trades and everything happening to see which how well some of my miners and traders were doing.
But you couldn't click on an individual ship to wee what it had been doing. You had to see that full list and mentally work out how much they had made.

[db48x]

Ships maintain no balance over time; they always send the money up to their superior (which is usually you, but might be a station).

So to see the real profit, go to the superior’s transaction list and filter it by the ship’s id. Money sent to the ship was used for purchases, and money coming back from the ship was the revenue from sales (or money returned due to discounts, but we can avoid going into detail on that topic here). The sum of those will be the profit.

[Ryno]

I believe that if your ship has the trading extension installed then you get a profit/loss line when trading with a station. Ex. You buy energy cells for 14 per unit x 1000. You sell to a station buying at 15 per unit. It should show a line under the total selling amount of 1000 profit. The same is if the transaction would be a loss. The numbers would turn red when selling and show how much you would be losing on the trade versus the purchase price.

This is great when sending a trade ship to run around the map for you doing the trades. You can tell a trade ship to purchase Advanced Electronics, go to, for example, a wharf and the sell price might be less then the purchase price. You can then simply cancel both commands for the original purchase and sell before your trade ship arrives at the first station.

Hopefully this all makes sense. I am typing while semi listening to my wife ;)

[Tin Pony]

Originally posted by Ryno:

I believe that if your ship has the trading extension installed then you get a profit/loss line when trading with a station. Ex. You buy energy cells for 14 per unit x 1000. You sell to a station buying at 15 per unit. It should show a line under the total selling amount of 1000 profit. The same is if the transaction would be a loss. The numbers would turn red when selling and show how much you would be losing on the trade versus the purchase price.

This is great when sending a trade ship to run around the map for you doing the trades. You can tell a trade ship to purchase Advanced Electronics, go to, for example, a wharf and the sell price might be less then the purchase price. You can then simply cancel both commands for the original purchase and sell before your trade ship arrives at the first station.

Hopefully this all makes sense. I am typing while semi listening to my wife ;)

Yes. Well said. The trading extension is in the repair/upgrade software at an equipment dock.

Now, get your priorities right. Listen intently to her.

[Constans]

Thanks for the responses, but I'm still not sure I'm getting this.

I have the trading extension Mk1 installed.

I've gone to the player account and filtered for the ship in question.

Profit is not shown, only the amount a good was ordered for, the price difference between the order price and the price the ship actually paid, and the proceeds from the eventual sale of the goods. (The game calls the last two of these "profit", but they aren't: profit = proceeds of sale - cost of goods sold.)

The log goes back as far as -12h 05m, but I see the first entry is a sale, so it looks like the game drops off the older information over time.

If I look at all the information available, the first page of the player transaction log for the ship in question shows +51,143 CR and the second page shows -67,862 CR, so I'm losing -16,719 credits over 12 hours of activity. (That's not exact, as they is some inventory to be sold, but, as I mentioned, there is that first proceeds entry which doesn't have a corresponding purchase, and eyeballing these I think they roughly cancel each other out).

So, am I understanding this correctly: I'm making no money on this "fill shortages" standing order?

[db48x]

Profit is shown at the bottom of the table, where it sums up all visible transactions. Well, it will be profit if it is adding up both your revenue and your costs. Naturally, if you have some other set of transactions shown then the total will be something other than profit.

So, what product are you moving? Your numbers seem extremely low. How many transactions per hour is your ship managing? How much product per trip? You might be moving a product that isn’t in high supply, or that doesn’t have high demand, or that doesn’t have high profit per m³. Hard for us to say without more details. Show us a screenshot even.

[Constans]

These are from the two pages of my player transaction log filtered for the ship in question:

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2153343076089532886/5335F718F6D0F5E9A8C815E15B37C0B28FADA05A/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2153343076089532606/5BE8AC1328C980AFDDC12C7CD2D93C1E3E37AB99/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

This is for the ship to show what it is trading in:

https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2153343076089532391/FBFD25968B838A094B44B30DCCB928876DFFFCF5/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

[Tin Pony]

Jump to timestamp 04:20
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3060888714

[Constans]

Originally posted by Tin Pony:

Jump to timestamp 04:20
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3060888714

Thanks, I just had a look at that. What the video does at 4:20+ is what I did for my first two screenshots. They show me making a loss over 12 hours when combined - I just want to make sure I'm understanding these screens correctly as I'm surprised by the result.

[db48x]

It looks like you are making a lot of very small trades for a very small amount of profit each time.

If we ignore the first two transactions at the top of the first screenshot (because the ship just bought cargo but hasn’t sold it yet),. we see that it bought cargo for 23,388Cr and then sold it 10 minutes later for 24,582Cr. Even if it did that trade over and over, that is only 7,200Cr/h. Assuming a medium loadout, that ship will take 54 hours to pay for itself.

You need to find a trade where the sale price and buy price are _much_ further apart. You need to find buyers who are really _desperate_ for antimatter cells, or a better type of cargo to move.

The best cargoes for the courier–class ships are both small (less m³ per ware), have a great profit margin, and insatiable demand. Unfortunately, these tend to be illegal wares like spacefuel, spaceweed, and maja dust. Fortunately, these are not all illegal everywhere. The Teladi haven’t outlawed any of them, because it would cut into their profitssss. The Paranid have outlawed maja dust, but then they’re mostly the only ones who want it. The Paranid and the Argon have outlawed spaceweed (I forget if the Terrans have or not), mostly in an unjust attempt to limit Teladi profitssss. Only the Argon (and the Terran?) have outlawed spacefuel. Once you find the right buyers, moving spaceweed or spacefuel in Teladi space can be really profitable.

Speaking of the ship, the Callisto Sentinel is possibly the worst small ship for cargo work. It has very mediocre stats all around. Just comparing it to other courier–class ships, it’s a bit slower that most of the rest, has a rather low acceleration, and has one quarter of the cargo space of the best available ship.

Might I recommend the Terran Frog? You need a DLC for that one, but it has over 4000m³ of cargo space. It has half the top travel speed of your Callisto, but it more than makes up for it by accelerating to that top speed in just 3 seconds (your Callisto takes 30 seconds to reach its top speed).

Barring that, any of the Teladi courier ships would do. They have less cargo space, but still around 3× what the Callisto has. They have the same or higher top speeds and higher accelerations than your Callisto, though by a much smaller margin.

Another option in the courier class is the Argon Courier. Both the Sentinel and Vanguard versions have more cargo space than the Callisto. They both have a 50% advantage in top speed, and their acceleration is just high enough that they reach that top speed in the same 30 seconds as the Callisto. They have about double the overall performance as your Callisto, and they’re available from the same shipyards that you’ve already visited.

Finally, for trading might I recommend moving up to medium ships? The worst medium ship will beat the best small ship by at least 2×. They’re all slower than the couriers, but they more than make up for it by having between 5× and 15× the cargo space. Again the Terran and Teladi ships are usually the best.

Of course it is difficult to find any of this out without actually exploring the universe and collecting all the stats on all of the ships. Once you do, however, you will find that the encyclopedia has all of the stats, and also lets you directly compare multiple ships. Unfortunately, the one important stat that the encyclopedia leaves out is the acceleration. For that, you can use a site like Roguey’s X4 ship database[roguey.co.uk]. Just know that combat engines give the best acceleration, but that the mk3 engines are super expensive and take ages to pay off in most cases. Stick to the mk2 combat engines.

I should also point out that if you really want to optimize a freighter, putting Terran combat engines on it will really boost the acceleration. You will also lose top speed, but the tradeoff is always worth it; any cargo ship will be improved overall this way. Of course it is expensive and takes a lot of extra micro to send all your ships to Terran space to get refitted, so not all players do that. With Terran engines, all of the Teladi courier ships beat the Terran Frog hands down.

[db48x]

Oh, and I almost forgot. In the second screenshot I think you were buying cargo and then selling it to a station that you own, probably your PHQ. Unfortunately, transactions between your own ships and your own stations are not recorded. They don’t move money around either, but I am sad that they don’t leave any record behind. You probably lost money and gained research, so overall you made a profit. Just not the kind that this screen can show :)

[Constans]

Originally posted by db48x:

It looks like you are making a lot of very small trades for a very small amount of profit each time.

...

Thanks very much for all the tips. I'll take them on board. So far the AI pilot was running this ship on "Fill shortages" ... so it doesn't look like it searches out very good trades.

[Constans]

Originally posted by db48x:

Oh, and I almost forgot. In the second screenshot I think you were buying cargo and then selling it to a station that you own, probably your PHQ. Unfortunately, transactions between your own ships and your own stations are not recorded. They don’t move money around either, but I am sad that they don’t leave any record behind. You probably lost money and gained research, so overall you made a profit. Just not the kind that this screen can show :)

I don't remember trading with my PHQ. Perhaps the AI did it. Could anything else cause these missing records?