If you get the right combination of faction states (Boom, Outbreak, etc.) and economy types (Agricultural, Industrial, etc.) in the region you can make an absolute killing doing trade missions.

I was in Tun stacking some massacre missions for conflict zones. As part of doing that, I would stack trade missions that involve one or two stations and do those hops instead of manually flipping the board. One faction went into boom, and suddenly I was making more trading than in the CZ.. so upwards of 30 million/hour, and that was just in a Python when you could have made a lot more with a larger ship. I even ran it shieldless for a couple of days to maximise returns. Just an endless stream of multi-million missions delivering various alcoholic beverages to one station.

I feel if you could find such places, and then work out why that's happening, you'd then be able to find similar systems, or engineer such systems towards the edge of the bubble by manipulating the BGS (which is trivial in systems nobody goes to). I'm doing other things at the moment, but I'm definitely going to look into this soon.

In the case of Tun to LHS 535 where I made the most I've ever made trading (as described above):

• Tun is agricultural and LHS 535 is industrial, so there is a clear path of supply/demand there (alcohol).
• LHS 535 (and Tun actually, for the reverse) has just one station, meaning missions don't get spread between (reducing cr/hr).
• The faction that was giving me the majority of the alcohol missions was in boom, but I don't recall which it was. I was getting about 2/3 from that faction and 1/3 from all the rest combined.
• Other neighbouring systems must have been in states that made them less amenable to receiving those boom missions (i.e. in war/election, outbreak, etc.) leaving LHS 535 to be the only viable target for them.

That last point is where I need more information to work-out what was going on. The route became less profitable as more destinations for those trade missions became available.. so rather than everything going to LHS 535, around half of them started appearing for another system (Hyperion IIRC), then the next day another system was added to the destinations, and the route was effectively ruined. What was happening in those systems I'm not quite sure, but I would expect they were in states like Bust, Civil War, Outbreak, etc.

So I feel the key is in trying to limit the potential mission destinations for factions in boom by manipulating the BGS. Now, sure, this seems like a lot of work.. but once you've cracked it, you've got a really solid path to making a load of credits trading. The BGS is easy to manipulate in the less visited edges of the bubble, even alone - but with a couple of friends then it becomes trivial. It's either that, or spending 100 hours doing things the normal way!

I'm doing other things at the moment, in the run-up to 2.3, but after that I'm definitely going to be playing around manipulating the BGS a lot more. I've been doing it for conflict zones and I can keep a system in endless war easily.