Why did you not calculate the black market rates? It is the point of the quote you're addressing.
Except i did, at a 50/50 rate in order to avoid the negative rep. Because someone theorized that splitting the trade in order to offset the black-market reputation hit. however i wasnt sure what the actual ratio you needed was so i went with 50/50.
But to humor you here we go. Supplies as always because i have that data on hand.
1x Cerberus
Buy Supplies at 20/Unit.
Sell 30 supplies at (50,49,48...ect) resulting in 465 Credits.
Include cost of a single cerberus from Corvus to Magec at 440 Credits.
Thats a grand total of 25 credits profit.
compare that to my calculations on page 1 of doing a 50/50 split you actually make 180% additional profit (to 70 creds), in fact looking into this 50/50 is the most efficient split.
I'm not quite sure that actually happens in the game yet. According to this post: http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=8359.0
It most certainly doesn't. Price adjustments as far as I know are not instantaneous like it is in some other games. The game requires time for the market to account for how much the traders have brought in over a set period of time. I think Alex pointed out in that thread it won't be as safe to dump all that food on the world in one big transaction, but it mostly seems to be limited to food shortages.
Price changes are instantaneous for non alert goods as far as i know. I havent looked at alert goods yet.
If you go to a station to sell 1 item at 114 credits. and you shift click to stack two together the total price is not 228 but in fact 227.
Yes it is sometimes more profitable to do bounties, although these too sometimes dry up, but I think the main difference is that there's no real danger to doing trade runs nor is there a test of player skill. In your traditional trading archtype system, it's usually little better than a cookie clicker in terms of actual gameplay.
please read what i said again
In terms of most to least profitable;
Alert Trading.
Alert Combat
Non-Alert Combat
Non-Alert Trading.
Even if Combat Alerts dry up. Non-Alert combat is still vastly more profitable than non-alert trading.
The ONLY time it is not more profitable to do bounties is when you have a food shortage aka "Alert Trading"
Curiously, the construction of markets can be quite easily procedural. 30%? With a procedural system, that Alex is moving towards and also the fact that tarrifs are a mutable stat, I wouldn't be surprised to see variable market tarrifs across the different star systems, and to vary based upon faction relationship.
Being able to change the tariff with reputation or a skill would be very nice and would possibly make trading more useful. That said if the current system is totally procedural in a few in-game years (so long as the AI is charged tariff and doesnt have infinite money)the economy would actually balance out and allow player trade to actually work.
As it stands now there is just no room for trading, either the production/consumption rates are too low, or the AI is too omnipotent.