You'll Thank Me Later
14 Dec 2020Elkyri
Jekhowsky Orbital3306.04.26
"You'll thank me later," that old spacer had said. I wish I had caught his name or at least the name of his ship so I could do just that. Holding out for the Cobra was the right move. I don't know that it paid for itself on the first run, as he claimed it would, but it has over the last few months certainly done that and more. Running cargo is no longer a sideline and I'm turning an easy 1.3 million credits profit on a short one- or two-hop run. Picking up courier missions is now just a little bit of icing on the cake.
As always, there is more to it than first meets the eye. Moving into Xenia, as I named the Cobra, wasn't enough by itself. The trick is knowing where to buy low and where to sell high. I got turned onto the right tool for that job by the navigator on a tramp freighter while she was waiting for the station crew to unload her ship's cargo.
"I see you're taking delivery missions off the board," she said, looking over my shoulder.
"Yeah," I answered. "You got something you need hauled somewhere?"
"You're kidding, right?" She smiled. "No, we do the hauling but we're hauling our own cargo, not someone else's. You turn a much better profit that way."
"How so? This guy here is offering two-hundred twenty thousand credits to haul 30 tons and I still have room for the 24 tons this guy wants hauled to the same place. Between the two of them that's almost a half-million credits for a short hop. I'll be back in time for lunch."
"Chicken feed." She pulled a tablet out of her pocket and swiped it to life.
"Look," she said, handing the tablet to me. "What's bauxite going for here?"
"Nine hundred credits a ton." I shrugged. "So?"
She took the tablet and typed in a query, her fingers deftly moving over the screen. After a moment she nodded in satisfaction then handed the tablet back to me. "Okay, now tell me what bauxite is selling for there."
"Twenty-five thousand per ton," I gasped, wide-eyed in surprise. I ran the numbers in my head. It worked out to one and a half-million credits for one run. Now she really had my attention.
"How do you know that?" I asked. "That price isn't showing up anywhere on the commodities board."
"Why would it? One of the keys to success in this business is not always telling everything you know."
"So is that some secret cabal you have there, where you have to know the secret handshake or something to get access to that info?"
"No, not really a secret but not necessarily well known either. It's just that traders -- at least traders like us -- check the commodity inventories and prices whenever we dock somewhere. That gets fed back through the net into a database that others can search looking for a run that will net them a good profit."
"So I don't need to belong to some sort of union or anything to get that info?" I was incredulous.
"Nope. Just get on the 'net and find EDDB and you'll figure it out from there."
I decided not to wait until later. "Thank you," I said. "You've been a fantastic help. I don't know that I could have found that on my own."