Still, when you are poor and can't afford anything iti s rather annoying you can't do the missions either 
If I could pull off a trader start on the hidden "Spacer" extra difficulty where all you get as start is a Kite(S), around 4k credits, 2 crew member and fuel supply on the low 2 digits with monthly permanent debt hitting you at the end of each month instead of "monthly stipend" credit stimulus, and raise my self up to the point where I have 2 colonies narrowly sustaining me, then you most definitely can pull it off on easy/normal difficulty.
Here is a couple good tips for a strong start that will begin snowballing you in the right direction if you do it right and hellbent on trading: Forget bar hauling missions early on, when you barely have anything cargo space and ship wise, your best bet is smuggling, low volume, high value cargo is the name of the game. Buy heavy armaments, recreational drugs, harvested organs, F1 over them in your inventory often when you are within relay range of a system to see where the current most profitable shortages are.
While doing said smuggling rounds, interact with all the wrecked ships you see drifting around, easy to get and useful ships are going to be shepherds, hounds and cerberus-es all beefed up by increased cargo size and full set of speed hull mods for good hauling and high speed near uncatchable noncombat escape speeds. If you talent toward "Field Repairs" as you should early game as a trader, you don't even have to shy away from heavily d-moded hulls so long you still get to salvage them without spending story points, mules buffalos and tarsuses are a great big bump to cargo when you can save them, but they will slow you down therefore I like to mostly skip destroyer sized haulers.
Always check bars, our priority will not be the high volume haul missions yet but the "I need you to smuggle this cargo to that station" and "I need to clear out this entire warehouse of X commodity for cheap cheap firesale price" which are great profit opportunities, you may also get better much better deal on hauling ships in bar events.
Once you saved up a couple hundred thousand credits (which by no means should take too long) you can begin transitioning toward Colossus stacking, just slap expanded cargo and augmented drive fields (the latter which's modspec blueprint you should keep an eye out for while trading) hull mods on them then whatever for the rest of op cost. At this point you can comfortably think about hauling missions as smuggling will start to become a lot lot harder with the reduced speed and increased sensor profile of your fleet. Also save every time before leaving or jumping into a system so you don't end up as pirate food, realizing you haven't saved in 30min+ ago, alternatively, consider slowly incorporating combat ships into your fleet as it grows, so it can hold off most nuisance trying to take your stuff.
Bonus tip: If you plan on finally starting your colony
never start the first one close to the edge and far from core worlds and ideally go for 50-125% haz rating at most, anything worse and you may be looking at a colony that actually cost you money to up keep rather than help your income for a long long time till you can turn it profitable with upgrades due to the new massive accessibility penalties for distant colonies and heavier hazard rating penalties on industry up keep.
Hope all this helps something.
