-EDIT- I found
this guide at Reddit, accompanied by
this spreadsheet outlining a number of strategies for exploiting trade routes to earn money. It seems like the easiest, and the one I'm going to try first, is to just buy up all the technology modules for sale, immediately sell them all back to crater their price, buy and sell them AGAIN to drive the price as low as it will go, buy them all one last time and then jump to a new system where you can sell them all and turn a profit on your initial investment. You then repeat (buy, sell, buy, jump system, sell, buy, sell, buy, jump system, etc.) until you get bored, sell your final bunch in the last system you visit and you'll make around 7 million per system visited. You don't even need to worry about economy type or strength. I've got 60 or so systems in my list, so that's potentially 400 million for an hour or two spent in menus. I'll see if there's any truth to it.
OK, so this works really, really well. I made nearly 500 million units in less than 40 minutes. It's boring, but ridiculously effective. Here's how it works:
Step 1: Buy all the Technology Modules from an NPC or space station terminal. The goal is to get as many as possible, so your best bet is to start in a "wealthy" economy system which tend to have more in stock. You'll want to completely empty your exosuit inventory, high capacity slots as well. Everything needs to be dedicated to Technology Modules.
Step 2: Sell all the Technology Modules you just bought at the space station terminal. Don't sell them back to an NPC; they won't stack with NPC inventory and you'll lose the extras.
Step 3: Buy back all the Technology Modules again. Note the price listing; as you sell more and more in a single system, they will go from around -10% to -77% or so. If they're already at ~-75+%, it's time to move on. If not, repeat steps 2 and 3 again.
Step 4: Once the price is at ~77% or lower, buy as many as you can hold / afford. I had 305 total. 300+ is a good number to shoot for because it eliminates the need to engage in multiple rounds of sell/buy in a single system. It's time to teleport to a new system.
Step 6: Teleport to your new system. Go to the space station terminal and sell your entire inventory. If you're selling over 280 or so, you're going to break the economy in a single turn, which is ideal. When you sell, you'll be selling at around -10% (for 305, this was getting me around 15.5 million per sell).
Step 7: Buy them all back. They should be at -77% or so, which with 305 was costing me about 3.9 million. You sold them all at 15 or so, and you're only paying 4 to get them all back, so you're getting over 11 million on the transaction.
Step 8: Repeat steps 6 and 7 until you run out of systems or patience.
I did this for 50 or so systems and ended up going from 45 million to 515 million in less than 40 minutes. The system economies reset every 24 hours, so theoretically you could run your cycle for less than an hour a day and become a billionaire in fairly short order. And the more systems you can run through, the more you get; it was consistently 10+ million per system. Seems way more efficient than farming (although my word it is boring; have a good podcast or something handy).
