[tristanzz]

You can exploit the dock prices if you have good cash on hand (say, 2000-5000 gold), no taxes yet, low prices on the equipment commodities, and some cargo spaces at the dock. The idea is to equip a whole lot of colonists at once with one of the possible items. The issue is that equipment prices don't respond to equipping colonists right then: not until 1) turns go by or 2) you buy/sell commodities outright, using click-and-drag to your cargo holds.

So for instance, use your funds to put some new colonists on the dock. Finding a fountain of youth is an automatic ticket to ride here! Then, gear them all up with either tools, guns, or horses— tools might be best to start since each dude can carry 100 of them. A petty criminal can hold 100 tools just as well as anyone. You want to blow 95-99% of your money on new colonists and tools. The price of tools should not respond to this storm of activity until the next step.

The next step is buying more tools, actually, but this time we click and drag them directly into ship cargo holds. What this does is cause the prices to respond to all the buying you previously did. The price should start skyrocketing with every purchase. You can Shift-click-and-drag to purchase one tool at a time in this step, and you can stop buying when the price stabilizes.

When the price seems firm, and hopefully a lot higher than when you equipped the colonists, you can sell all the colonists' tools back and make a tidy profit. Afterward, click-and-drag the cargo tools back into the market, one at a time, and prices will crash again. This cycle is repeatable.

You may find that prices do not crash all the way back down to their original level. The price of tools, guns, and horses have strong upward vectors in the European markets that prevent this. You can still make a lot of money, however, and with enough colonists and some creativity you can overload these vectors and make the price rocket all the way up and crash all the way back down, allowing you to acquire unlimited cash. Totally breaks the game, but it's just something I wanted to bring up. You can only see a few colonists on screen, but if you recruit more, you can select and gear them as well using the keyboard.