Buy low, sell high...
Almost every trade tutorial will tell you to buy low, sell high.
My advice is to take that to the extreme, and NEVER pay more than TT value for something if possible.... then take what you buy at TT value and make money off of it... The ways to do this would be person to person trading mostly, or utilization of some existing tools - Mainly
STTS.
Then, once you get yourself a steady profit stream, even if it's not a large amount of profits, keep doing that... Don't hunt/mine/craft, etc. until you have a very steady profit stream and are only using at max, 50% of the profits you make from trading in doing these costly professions which may or may not get you anything as a return on investment. If you are careful with how you do things you won't burn through money fast. If you are not careful, you can burn through money very quickly.
When I first strated out, I mainly used 2x0 axe and hunted for about 2 months. I burned through a couple of hundred US Dollars very quickly.
Later, I had some technical problems, and lost my connection to EU for about 9 months until I upgraded my computer. After that I re-logged in and decided to focus on trading. I started small buying blueprints off of a crafting friend at TT prices and selling them for very cheap - about 5-50 pec each. That was not much money, but even at 5 pecs, since the bps were worth 1 pec each, I was making 500% profits.
Later, I lost contact with that friend, but got in to STTS. I started buying things off of other avatars and the auction at TT prices to feed in to STTS. I still do this today sometimes. I should warn you though, it is not as fast of a profit as person to person trading because Josh, the guy running STTS, mainly sells in auctions, so that ties up his peds a lot of times, which in turn ties up the peds of his agents. I'm interested in starting something similar to STTS but that focuses on person to person trading... but so far that has not come about. Be careful if you do get in to the investment side of STTS. At the moment, it is safe, and I was one of the biggest investors in it when it first started up, but have since pulled most of my peds out of the investment side. MA does not guarantee anything like STTS so there is always possibilities for scams, even if great and friendly and reputable avatars like Josh are involved...
I have never been scammed STTS yet, and don't think anyone else has been, but STTS is somewhat similar to
R&R Fund which does appear to have been a bit of a scam based on what I've read about it. I put the link here just for information purposes since it's good to see the bad as well as the good before you get involved in any sort of in game fund, especially since none of them are guaranteed to not be scams.
Before STTS existed, I thought about joining
Entropia Investment Fund, but I decided that I did not want to get involved in it for a number of reasons. It's a bit more risky than STTS because it involves buying in to the fund prior to doing a lot of TT trading with the Fond Manager, like anyone can do with STTS whether they have an investment in STTS or not. Originally, when EIF first started there was a 90 day buyback guarantee, where investors would be returned their original investment + any profits made after 90 days. That guarantee no longer exists, and the main reason for that is that EIF has made some very large purchases, which may or may not end up being profitable in a long while... They bought a couple of LAs, a mall shop, and a hanger, all of which are items that have a TT value of zero. If market value drops below the level that they purchased those items at, they will lose money on it. EIF has thus turned itself in to a very long term investment plan instead of a short term investment opportunity like STTS is currently.
Eventually, I joined a new trading society, NBK Entrepreneurs (a great society by the way for anyone that wants to get focused mainly in the economic side of the game). Many of the folks in our society are trading gurus since that's our main profession in game. We have a large number of shop owners and regular person to person traders that can be found at Port Atlantis, Twin Peaks, and CND's Control Room most days in our ranks, as well as the website owner of
http://www.entropiabay.com, one of potentially the best trade websites related to EU that exists today.
Besides investigating STTS you might want to get involved in various consignment shops - that is shops that buy at TT value, sell, and pay you back profits later. The best consignment shop I've found in game is currently run by my society mate, Nihilist.
Dead Man's Plunder is the name of his shop and it's in Port Atlantis Mall.
There are a large number of ways to keep yourself on a budget in EU. I did make a very large deposit not long ago, and have kept most of the peds involved in that at the level it was or at a higher level than it was since that time by being careful with my spending and buying smartly. If you are careful, and patient, you can do likewise, and possibly do better than me. Just remember, TT Value of things is the only amount that is more or less a price that you can be guarnteed to get back. Spending more than that will get you things faster, but it also comes with potential risks.
Eventually, I'm thinking about turning my Booth - Omegaton Delta Tower, Booth #3, in to a consignment shop, where I can play a role similar to the role that great folks like those involved in Dead Man's Plunder and STTS have played in my avatar's life. However, I have not worked out all the details of that yet. If you are interested in getting in to something like that shoot me a pm.
Other ways to make profits besides trading is mainly sweating and fruit/stone gathering. Forget about the rig unless you are brave and plan on wasting a lot of time for little payback since the rig is a PvP zone, and the odds of you getting there and actually getting oil before you die are not very good.
If you get in to sweating, go get the Neas TP. Actually, you should go get all the TPs, but for sweating this one is important at the moment since that's where most sweaters go to work together to gather sweat, and is also where various avatars sometimes go to heal or give focus bubbles to avatars that are sweating for free!
Just be aware that sweating is not a fast profit. On average, you can get about 1000 bottles of sweat in about a 5 hour span of time if all you do is sweat at Neas. It is highly boring, but it is a profit since you can sell sweat for at a rate of around 5 ped for 1000 sweat currently. That price may go down eventually... That means you can basically get paid 50 cents for 5 hours of work if sweating is your main profession. Like I said, not a lot of profit, but it is more than nothing I guess. Trading has the potential to give faster profits if you do it carefully. Finding stones/fruit is a lot slower than sweating since you can't just know where to go to find the stuff, like you can at Neas with sweat. On average, if you walk a long ways, you can expect to maybe find some stones or fruit once every 15-30 minutes of walking, and the amount you find will vary greatly, but rarely be more profitable than sweating at neas is.
Other various funds exist other than those I've mentioned here... but the ones I've mentioned here are the main ones that I'm aware of that actually had the potential to work well. I have heard that
Pirate's fund is ok, but that at some point in time, there was a loss on it. The now defunt OT I fund was doing ok too, but it broke up eventually.... That was an in society fund related to the OT I society. I've never been in that society but knew some freinds that used to be in there. I have no idea if that still exits in some new form or not. Entropia Holdings does not exist, even though it still has a website. You can do a search here in the forums about mmabigshow for more info on that. I have no idea if the guy that run that plans to come back in game. He originally had some interesting ideas, and brought his ideas to the public here in the forums, and got heavily chewed out by a lot of folks after one auction he did didn't work out to well, and after a lot of people kept expecting far more out of him than they should have. Be very careful about posting things here in the forums because at times people can be very mean and hurtful even if they don't always intend to be. That first W on WWW in front of entropiaforum.com means World. There's an entire World of avatars here in the forums and in EU as well - anyone in the world could be the avatar standing next to yours. Just like in the real world, precautions should sometimes be taken, especially when real world money might become involved in some way.
DON'T buy armor too soon, especially if you don't have all the TPs yet. It will just cause you decay costs. If you do have some peds on you, but don't have all the TPs yet, a better investment would be a lesser teleport chip, the TT implant to make it work, the TT inserter to put that implant in, and some peds to pay for mindforce and repair bill on the chip. That way you can mainly run around without armor to find all TPs, and if you do get trapped somewhere and can't get past a mob at a certain location, you can use the TP chip to jump past the trouble area. Just be careful to not over-use it since you really don't want to waste a lot of peds on mindforce that you don't need to in an easy area where you can just run past by going in a different direction and circling around the mob. Unfortunately, there are some areas where if you are a n00b with no armor, and no TP chip, you can get stuck for days if you don't get a rescue party to help you. A TP chip is helpful in those times. I actually use some of those locations to trap myself sometimes so that I can stay there a few days and stay away from the auction since I have a bit of a auction addiction - I basically bid on any auction where no one else has bid and start bid is TT value or lower. I usually lose the bid on those auctions since most times I will get overbid, but I do also win a lot of times. Sometimes, I have to go trap myself somewhere for a long time to keep myself from that addicting behavior. I should start an Auction Bidders Annonymous support group someday, lol. Besides trapping myself in the wilds to keep myself from this addiction, so that I get more peds on my card, I also sometimes go to New Switzerland and go upstairs in the lighthouse to just watch the machine turn and turn endlessly. It's kind of a silly thing to do, but it keeps me from that blasted auction room, bidding on stuff I will likely not win, putting all my peds in limbo til the auctions end.
I am interested in setting up TT Trading Alliances, where avatars trade items at TT prices to one another for the benefit of all involved - hunters get cheaper weapons and armor, estate owners get cheaper furniture, crafters get cheaper crafting supplies, miners get cheaper miner gear, and shop owners get cheaper things to sell than they could otherwise get by paying full market value on the auction. I started a TT Trading alliance a while back with the United Buyers Exchange Resource (U.B.E.R.) social group here on entropiaforum, but it has mostly died out due to lack of interest by various parties that were originally very interested in the idea, but lost interest when they discovered that they needed to put in some effort in meeting different avatars in game and/or actually offer things to others at TT value if they really wanted to get things at TT prices off of others... Trading is a two way street. You usually don't get too many discounts unless you offer something in return.
As was seen in the last Landgrab Event, Alliances do work very well in the virtual world of Entropia Universe. What I am interested in doing is taking that philosophy and applying it to the overall economy of the Entropia Universe. Working together we can achieve more than we can working as individuals in competition with one another. This is true both for battlefields as well as in the market place. PM me if you are interested in doing TT trading with me on some level.
I currently have an apartment that I've set up as a TT trading resource for the NBK group of societies, and for various other avatars that regularly TT me stuff. Basically I will allow you to buy things from me at TT prices if you are not in the NBK but regularly TT stuff to me in exchange. It sort of works like an in-game version of freecycle, with the difference being that instead of being free, things are traded at TT value, which is about the closest thing EU has to the concept of "free" as you can get TT value from anything back at the Trade Terminal... I currently have over 1k ped tied up in this idea, and plan on continuing to develop the idea over time in to something much grander than it is currently. However, I'm going to need people to help me out along the way, and will try to help them out as well. Eventually I want to create a team of dedicated traders that can use the items that I, and others that are involved, obtain at TT value as a supply line that the team of traders can use to trade with, profit from with almost no risk, and then share profits back - it would be similar to a consignment shop, but would be avatar based instead of shop based. Entropia Investment Fund proved that it is possible to do this sort of thing on a grand scale and profit. STTS proved that there is a lot of things people regularly sell to the TT that has some profit potential and that a lot of avatars are interested in this kind of program.... What I plan to do is take the ideas I've learned by watching funds like STTS and EIF grow, and watching their mistakes as well, and expand on their good ideas, learn from their mistakes, but do so with the person to person trading market instead of just keeping things all tied up in one shop area or avatar like EIF does, where things might sit a long while with no one looking at them, or in the auction like STTS does, where auction fees are being paid regardless of whether anyone actually bids. There are very active traders in the ore/enmatter markets that are regularly trading things daily at a number of different locations.... some of which do so by acting more or less as an avatar based consignment shop that is in various trade agreements with certain miners... I think that there is potential to take that idea and expand it in to other niche markets as well....