View source for Board Thread:New on the Elite: Dangerous Wiki/@comment-27651919-20160121181612/@comment-27311754-20160122180458

The honest way is to look at the prices of the goods in the Commodities Market, noting down anything which you can buy for much less than the galactic average or sell for much more, then flying to a nearby system to compare prices. Buy low, sell high, look for better deals as you go. 

That's how old-school Elite players used to do it, with lined paper and a pencil. You can also use Excel or the Cmdr's Log tool by Dharkamen and update values as you learn them.

The lazy answer is to do what most of the other players do and check [http://www.elitetradingtool.co.uk/ elitetradingtool.co.uk]: it has tools for finding good trades in the local area or, if you know where you want to go, finding the best trades bewteen your current station and your destination.

As a newbie, you can also trade [[List of Rare Commodities|Rare Commodities]]. These are items which only come in small amounts and from a single station each, but which sell for a lot more the further you get from their source. After a while, your hold will be too big to make this profitable, but you can easily fill up a [[Hauler]] with rare goods from a cluster of systems in the same region - I recommend [[Lave]] and environs.