Business opportunities in STO: what is the best way to profits?

[Tapasvi]

I was thinking about the efficient ways to get profit in this game (EC or DIL, doesn't matter much because they're exchangeable).
By efficient, I mean maximum reward for an hour of activity. Which maybe involve other investments such as using head or investing real money in Zen.

I've made some rough calculations...
Random TFO farming as an "average" job is equal to the job for $30 a month. The number will slightly differ depending of how good you're at it, or with Elite difficulty, but not like x10 or something like that, so doing that just for dil/ec looks like a waste of time. Just pay these $30 and save crazy amount of time. "Rate divided by time equals profit. " - Rule of Acquisition #54.

The second option I was looking at was trading on the Dilithium exchange. This also didn't work well even on paper. There are opportunities for trade during certain events (according to the price history https://i.redd.it/ipl8x5gnxiny.png). While there's no noteworthy movement outside of these events, these big movements are almost a free +15 Dilithium for every Zen coin you have. The problem is the available volume in the order book and with more than 30.000 Zen you'll already affecting the market a lot, so there's a soft cap of something like 500.000 dil earned per event, which is according to the chart is approximately once in a half a year. Not really interesting...

The next thing I'm thinking about now is doff farming in the academy. It gives approximately 8 white (maybe a little more considering occasional green and blues, and not counting additional recruitment NPCs which require running through academy for a couple of hours) doffs every 96 hours. They cost ~30.000 EC each on the exchange (civilians are cheaper, but that's not so important right now). It will fill up a roster in (100/8)*96/24 = 48 days and give 3mil EC after selling them. Now let's suppose investing in all the character slots and having 50 of alts, which, without considering further factors, will yield roughly 150mil EC for 1.5 months almost AFK.
Now, I'm not naive, I suspect that's not so simple. The biggest issue I see right now is will the Exchange will be able to chew so many doffs? Or still, a lot of attention required for posting doffs as they arrive, to soften the impact. I'm planning to test it in a month or so, with only about half of the maximum alts, but at this rate, it'll be probably easy to extrapolate to how it'll be on the full stack.

Maybe more experienced players can share some wisdom on this topic? How big men do profits...

[Vellari]

Personally...the exchange, buy low sell big, as usual. BUT.

Requires investment capital (hundreds of millions of EC if not in the billions) and knowledge/update of knowledge on what is on demand/high value.

Dilithium (and by extension Zen) is capped, so multiple characters is the only sensible way.

[Nimbull]

Best way to make money? Pick up a book on COBOL programming, learn it, and get a job with a financial institution working on keeping their 50+ year old software running.

[Tapasvi]

Originally posted by Nimbull:

Best way to make money? Pick up a book on COBOL programming, learn it, and get a job with a financial institution working on keeping their 50+ year old software running.

The income should be scalable, if we're talking about some real money at least in the perspective. I.e. it should be designed in such a way that if you invest more money, you'll get more money for (at least almost) the same amount of effort). So developing own software, and having some sort of own research pipeline is required.