Are You a Trader? Ahoy mates.
I think you all know of 2 ways of making poes, but have you ever considered the third way?
The 2 are: First, of course pilly and SMH, the second is working in a shoppe/stall. Btw if you have a laborbadge, take a job in one of my stalls, it is well-paid 
The third way is the one i will tell you about here: Trading
The idea is simple: buy cheap and sell with profit.
You bid for a commodity at an market, and when the bid ticket is filled you pass by on a vessel and collect it, and sail to another island where you sell it.
Simple.
Examples:
Wood: buy it at Lima for 20-22 poe/unit, transport it to Dragons Nest and sell it for 33-37 poes/unit
Sugar: Buy it at Napi or Harmattan for 5 poes/unit and sell it at Jubilee for 10 poes/unit
And there are numerous other examples, just take the ferry to different islands and take a look at the prices at the market.
What does it cost? First off all: the time it takes to sail between the islands. It depends on the vesseltype and manning.
Larger vessels require jobbers, and that minimize the profit, but you can do the math. yourself; to get the good jobbers the pay must be 25-50 poes/league - a couple of days ago i was on a Merchant Galleon where i got paid 100 poes/league... I suppose they were desperate for getting that cargo of wood. 
If you get in a fight there will often be a loss - you can’t winn them all; so put an extra expense on 5-10% in the budget.
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About vesselstypes:
Pesonally i often sail sloops alone with 3 swabbies, and it takes normally about 1/2 hour to travel through an archipelago. If you go interarch. you can add ~20 min.
The sloop has only small cargo capacity, so i often solo a cutter, with 3x the cargo. The time is nearly the same, but it requires a lot more to solo a cutter than a sloop, first of all you have to be good on sails. On a sloop you can let the bots sail after getting it started, and take a look out in the crows nest to avoid trouble, on an cutter you have to be on the sails all the time, and when you get intecepted: run away; you have to be very good to winn a fight, you and 3 low level bots againt 7 bots - or the monkeyboat - but off course it can be done…
I haven’t tried to solo larger vessels… yet. 
