THE JUMPGATE DEFINITIVE GUIDE - Tripod

Wake produces water, while Outpost does not. Outpost requires water to
sustain the population of the station and nearby planet, and to produce
manufactured food and beer.
Water tends to be in shortage at Outpost because it gets used up quickly.
So, we have a strong demand but no supply at Outpost, with a natural supply at
Wake, which gives a fixed price difference. A tendency towards shortage of
Water at Outpost is probably leading to a higher variable price difference. The
profit margin is so high a percentage that variable price differences will account
for a small proportion of total price difference.
Price differences are commonly identified using data made available from
JOSSH, http://www.jossh.com/ .
Most pilots use third party utilities that process dynamic price/inventory data.
Commonly used utilities include Slopey's WebTracker ( http://www.slopey.com/
) and Gossip's Market Lister ( http://www.jumpgateweb.com/MarketLister/ ), but
there are various others listed at the bottom. These sum fixed and variable price
differences to give the same sort of value that would be displayed in-station.
They tend to report data that is 5-30 minutes out of date, so often miss
profitable runs. Most such utilities allow the calculation of a single commodity
that appears to give the best profit when transported between a pair of stations
specified. Careful analysis of options may reveal the true best profit to be a
combination of different commodities.
Alternatively, production patterns can be examined to reveal where there are
likely to be fixed price differences. Again, there are utilities available to assist in
processing JOSSH database data.
Precisely how much do prices change?
Here is Baadf00d's current price range theory (this aggregates fixed and
variable differences):
Stations that produce an item: Base Price -- Base Price * 103%
Stations that neither produce nor demand: Base Price + 200 -- ( Base Price *
105% ) + 200
Station that demand but don't produce: Base Price + 500 -- ( Base Price * 107%
) + 500
Note that price changes are most obvious where stocks are small (below 'full
stock' of 2000 units). Where high value items are over-stocked at demanding
stations and under-stocked at production stations, it is theoretically possible for
prices to be highest at producing stations. This accounts for many apparent
oddities on the US server at the time of writing.
Xindaan offers precise way of determining price based on stock:
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