What would really be handy is an automatic log of all tranactions you've made. The computer could track what prices you've bought and sold each commodity for at every station you've visited. It would display in spreadhseet format, with columns for each station and rows for commodities. Would save a lot of pencil & paper work if you're into mining/trading.

I've found that knowing these numbers is only 1/3 what you need to know to trade effectively. Under the current rules, the best trade is one where the destination station doesn't sell the commodity AND which buys at a higher price than you paid AND which has the commodity on its "in demand" list. If you merely practice "buy low, sell high" you'll get lukewarm results from trading.

I'm still experimenting with the right way to track all this data, but it's definitely more complicated than a simple matrix.

Agreed. What I was suggesting certainly wouldn't be perfect, just better than doing it by hand. Also, the way I envisioned it, the only data that would be recorded would be for places you've actually been and trades you've made - you'd still have to do a lot of exploring to collect the information. Oh, and of course it would show what you paid/sold for on your last trip, which is no guarantee of what you'll get next time around, merely a guideline.

this is slightly off topic but it kind of fits with this.

Why is it that we don't get a number of how much was paid to us when we sell collected items. It just displays cr that is received for doing a trade mission or for cr earned when a bonus is achieved during a combat training mission. Is there a way to see the amount made per transaction, other then to take note, then sell, and minus original total?

I don't think the code tracks your investment. There's no memory of how much you paid for your goods, so no way to tell you how much profit you made. Thinking about it, I'm not sure there is an easy way to represent such a number. If you jettison your purchased cargo, then mine some, how should that be counted?

Representing this intelligibly across lots of circumstances would be a real challenge.

I would just love to see a simple Average Purchase Price for each item in my hold.

Should be fairly simple to calculate since the system knows what price you bought an item at (or 0 for loot). Once a new item is added to the hold, it re-averages the prices.

If you do not get your cargo from a station, it is assumed as loot and added as 0 value. The only person the APP effects is yourself, so you'd only be losing your own credits by zeroing the value of your cargo.