Hi,
A couple thoughts come to mind when talking about speculative trade. As others have already noted it takes money to make money, and the more you start with typically the better off you will be.
I remember years ago, messing around with the original Traveller books, trying to do a little solitaire play, just to give me experience with how the rules worked.
My character had a fairly high skill rating in Admin (I think), which gave beneficial roles on the speculative trade tables. Unfortunately, early on once when I rolled up a good roll for something like radioactives or gems (or something like that) it turned out I only had enough money on hand to buy such a small amount that my profit wasn't that great, and I couldn't hold on to the cargo for long to try and make it to a planet where I would get an even better die roll modifier for selling, because I needed cash to make my mortgage payment.
Other times I was able to buy alot of relatively inexpensive stuff with the cash I had, but my cargo hold was so small (I think I was using a Seeker at the time) that I didn't make a lot of profit on those sales either.
Another thing to consider is how you play out the actual buying and selling. Looking at the Mongoose rule book it seems to talk some about the need to "seek out suppliers in the markets and bazaars themselves" on low tech worlds and/or sometimes using carousing or streetwise skills to seek out passengers, etc.
As such, if the players are putting an effort into looking for good deals such as saying that their character is going to this or that bar, or spending a couple hours each day tracking down leads, as a ref I wouldn't hesistate giving them the benefit of any Die Modifiers.
However, they spend most of their time on a planet doing non-trade related stuff and then just show up at a starport and assume that by virtue of one of their characters high skills, good cargos should just fall into their laps, maybe I wouldn't give them the full beneift of any DMs, since they aren't really doing anything to make use of the skills of their characters.
As such, I guess what I'm trying to say is that how you role play the situation should maybe have some impact on how successful the characters should be when buying and selling stuff.
Anyway, just some thoughts.
Regards
PF
