Success with CAG traders?

[willyshop]

So, I've been trying my hand at cag trading using the phq and hub. So far, the results are less than exemplary. I was hoping to build a large cag fleet, but if they all keep performing so dismally I think I might hold off. Here's and exerpt from one of the reports:

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Pilot: Dal Rider
Pilot rank: Major Dealer
Flight time: 56:52 hour
Employ time: 96:43 hour
Payment: 119,840 credits
Profit: -7,473,163 credits
Expenses: -64,105 credits

Should I just be patient and give them a chance? Has anybody gotten cags to be profitable for more than just tending factories?

I was thinking maybe they could complement a fleet of UT's by performing time arbitrage of goods; buying when their cheap and selling when they're not. At this rate, they seem pretty good with the buying but not so much selling.
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[willyshop]

Meanwhile, from one of my factories:

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Pilot: Halilo Lu
Pilot rank: Major Dealer
Flight time: 123:15 hour
Employ time: 201:00 hour
Payment: 252,295 credits
Profit: 223,556,761 credits
Expenses: -47,040 credits   

Maybe I should make sure I only hire boron pilots?

[bizbag]

Docks like the Hub and HQ's first priority is to keep stocked. They'll trade at profit to generate funds, but mostly they'll spend down their capital to fill up on goods. That's probably why that individual trader has "lost" you money.

[ajax34i]

To me it looks like Dal Rider is in charge of buying energy or whatever supplies you want bought, and Halilo Lu in charge of selling for profits. If the CAG is assigned to buy resources, he'll show a huge deficit, obviously.

Note that even if you set them to "Trader" to buy AND sell, they WILL get stuck on one job (buy energy) until the stop conditions are met, which, if you keep taking the energy out of the station, may never happen.

[GCU Grey Area]

Need to look at the CAG fleet as a whole to determine profitability. Some may have ended up doing mostly buying while other CAGs focused on selling. Indeed, to keep things simple I generally set my Hub fleet up so each ship is restricted to ONLY doing one of these roles. Currently have 24 CAGs working for my Hub (12 buyers, 12 sellers) trading in predominantly in minerals, food & other basic raw materials.

Inspired by this thread, just looked at the earnings & expenditure for mine to confirm that they are indeed making money for me. Current total earnings are 187 million after buying 123 million worth of stock. Total profit has therefore been around 64 million, so it definitely works.

Difficult to establish profitability on an hourly basis though since the CAGs all started at different times & in different ships (Baldrics at the start, recently replaced by Hyabusas) & the area in which they operated has changed radically. Initially they worked in Terran sectors only, however, once the war was over, Argon, Split & Teladi sectors were added. Boron & Paranid sectors remain off limits - they still hate me (with good reason - I keep murdering their RRF fleets to steal jump beacons).

Oldest batch of CAG pilots have around 160 hours of flight time so, at an absolute minimum, the fleet as a whole has been bringing in at least 400k per hour (the youngest batch by contrast have been flying for a mere 30 hours). Not great profits by factory standards I know, but it pays for all the other CAGs which buy my guns, missiles, etc & it certainly fulfills it's main roles of improving Trade Rank (so non-combat mission pay is better) & helping to keep NPC factories adequately supplied with raw materials.

[Patholos]

I use them successfully as sellers when I combine them with CLS2 buyers.

Currently have about 40 CAGS tending my universe with about 150 upcoming to smother the sectors.

Here's some troubleshooting tips:

What is his trade role?
Salesman is what you want.
By the looks of it, your CAG is buying stuff and doesnt seem to be selling well.

Check your pricing. Are your CAGS buying high and selling low?

To remedy this:
Use CLS2 to buy at low prices and dump into the hub or whatever dock/complex you have and CAG salesmen to sell it off.

In short:

BUY - Use CLS2
Sell - Use CAG

[Blue Wraith]

Perhaps my ignorance, but I found trading docks like the hub difficult to use with CAGs, since you can only set 1 price. With factories, you can at least set buying price for resources and selling price for intermediates and products.

I'm not sure it works this way, but if Hub's Sell price is used for buying and selling, then there is a potential for a CAG to buy products at that price and then turn around and sell them for the same price. Counting fees, this is a net loss. It's not guaranteed to happen that way, since they will look for the best buy/sell, but it could happen.

To fix that you could setup another trading station priced at avg -1, and put buying CAGs there, then setup a CLS to move product from buying station to the hub. Then set hub prices to avg + 1 and only use sales CAGs.

Personally, I use the Hub CAG only to gather resources for ship production, then a CLS to move it to the PHQ. In TC, PHQ CAG is bugged and never would come off Idle.

[willyshop]

Thanks, guys. Some very good advice. I just finished some complex building, which will free up funds for this hub trading project. I didn't have much luck using cls2 to buy inventory; there are far too many different wares being traded in my hub so the setup menu would just take ages.


I think I'll end up going with a split fleet, with half the cags buying and the other half selling. That way I know that at least some are bothering selling. I don't know if it will really pay for itself, but I still think it's a cool thing to try and should at least help keep the economy well lubricated.