Trader Profit

[Tanaka Khan]

Anyone else think it's insane? Pretty much a 50% mark up, even with a Legendary Appraiser. All the more reason to try and become self sufficient. Shame there's no actual currency you can sell your goods for and horde it away under the mountain.

[Estalagmita]

Easiest to do is just sell prepared food. 4k+ Trade value for each bin full of prepared food. Even more if you happen to have a clay industry going and actually decorate your pots before using them.

I've sold >150K in food and used clothes alone. Just by selling some gems in my first caravan to kickstart my economy.

But again that depends on which embark you took.
Try to make use of what's abundant on your embark and profit from that. Or kick start trading and improve the goods other civs sell to you. You'll get profit and imporved relations as well as some migrants coming.

Once you are inside the caverns you shouldn't have problems with food, clothing or booze ever again. So depending on what embark you took it might be worth it to invest some time and resources in a somewhat strong military so you don't run into some "FUN" in the caverns.

[Fel]

The whole profit thing is only an issue very early on in most cases (and only if you didn't prepare for the traders).

You can easily make valuable items, even out of renewable resources (cooked food for example) and buy out whole caravans (not just basic traders) that way.

In most cases beyond the first couple years you will be using the traders to "delete" surplus items (worn out clothes, goblinite, extra stuff crafted because dwarves need to craft things every now and then to be happy...), which is often already nearly enough to buy whatever you need.

Also, while there is no currency (in fort mode at least), you can mint your own coins to hoard away.

I don't know much about current mods but there used to be mods that used coins for various stuff (alchemy, special trading and so on).

[Darzan]

In my experience best thing is to sell gems and mastercraft bolts. They are very easy to make and value totally out of roof. Food is good too but can easily spoil when process gets stuck by some reason. Other then that just stone rings and amulets are totally fine.

I like to do 20+ small sales with 50% profit margin until trader is in great mood. Then I do one big sale with minimal profit for trader. I am not really sure how this affects next year trade but I do not think it matters too much.

[Gunsaremagic]

I sell figurines and cut gems