Inara is a great website/tool to help get around Elite galaxy. I highly encourage any one playing to have an account and log in and update your Cmdr. You can do this automatically in a number of ways or manually if you only want to be listed. I use the market place and various filters to find what I need in the game and it has saved me tremendous time. Even made 100 mil credits once as a result! The other fun aspect is that you can earn badges on the site for in-game activities! Although this may not be a huge deal its still adds a bit of extra fun!!!

 

https://inara.cz/cmdr/121333/

There is a lot that can be done with Inara. Want to find commodities? Just click on the Galaxy tab, then go to commodities and it will show nearby cheap goods. Want some cheap gold? Search for it using commodities and look for best exports. Here is the problem though, every other commander in the galaxy is also using Inara, and if you want cheap gold, well they do too. The chances of getting any cheap gold is slim because chances are, it's already been purchased up.

 

A savvy commander can make millions easy with gold and other precious metals. Gold can be purchased for as low as 4,300 credits and can be sold for as high as 67,700 credits. That is a profit of 63,400 credits per ton. A python with with a cargo hold of 284 tons will make 18 million credits per full cargo hold of gold. A fully laden Type 9 will make 49.7 million credits per full load!

 

The problem is getting it, because other commanders buy it too, and they frequently buy it out. There is a way to do it though using Inara and finding stations that have gold that isn't under the normal commodity search! It will take a little exploration though... Here is how to do it:

 

The trick is to look look for extraction and refinery economies that are suffering from an infrastructure failure. In Inara, search for Galaxy -> Nearest -> Minor Factions -> Infrastructure Failure. This will pull up factions nearest you suffering from an infrastructure failure. If no commander running Inara updating tools visited a station that has an infrastructure failure, it won't be in Inara. So there is a chance you will be the FIRST person to find the cheap gold! And if you're lucky and limit your search to systems with a large population, you may find a very large supply of it! I regularly find stations having over 10,000 tons of precious metals and each one of those is worth over 600 million credits, or more! Now you know why I don't run Inara updating tools!