There’s some trading going on in the higher tier, but it’s low volume like you said. It isn’t necessarily because there’s no trading, but because higher tier production requires a lot of lower tier production to support it. I play solo and up to 7 bases now with 3 extra permits. I don’t really find CX trading to be an issue, but you need to pick your products. It could definitively be better, but that’s going to require a massive overhaul of the production chains.
I have mentally created a CX tradability index for products to figure out what I could trade on the CX and what makes no sense. The components are :
- How many recipes require this material
- Of these recipes, what is the building distribution
- Of these recipes, what is the experts distribution
- If it’s an intermediary material, what is the global demand for the consumed material
- What is the value per ton/m3
- What is the tradability index of materials requiring this material
This explains why RAT and DW are highly traded, while AR and most electronic products are not.
RAT and DW are used in every recipe and score high on the first 3 points. AR is used for INS only, so its demand will only be as strong as the demand for INS, at which point you should just process it yourself. Materials with more recipes will have lower risk.
Materials like FEO are too heavy to move to the CX and back to a planet for processing. These would have a healthy market if we had planetary exchanges though.
Materials that are used in various industries, like PE, will see more trading because specialization is important and since you can’t have dual-specialization on a single planet, then going through the CX is economically advantageous. The CX connects a bunch of planets with different CoGC together and when you’re going to the CX to sell your stuff, chances are you’ll buy other stuff because you’re there already.
While corps do have an advantage in guaranteeing supply, they are not the reason why CX trading is dead. It’s because there’s too much risk involved in producing something that is used by a single recipe.
One among many solutions would be to modify all recipes by making them require 4 or 5 materials coming from various expertises to increase their tradability index.