Biggest mistakes you’ve made in E:D ?

TLDR: lost a stupid amount of money in a very short time by misreading buy and sell prices. I halved my available cash reserves.

I've just dropped a b*llock, and I'm a bit upset about it… After coming back from my first attempt at exploration around Musca Dark, then 'vertically' about 70 hops, I made a wide loop back to Musca and handed in the data for the ammonia world community goal.

By this point I had about 250M Cr (around the most I'd ever had iirc) and bought a Krait, updated it a bit, reducing my funds to about 120M Cr.

Now for the f*ck up.

I'd gone back to the bubble and made some decent money selling osmium there, and noticed they were paying about 60K Cr/t more than the Galactic average for something… Ooh good !

Switched to one of the commodity search sites and it gave a price that looked ok, even though they didn't have much of it, so I hot-footed it over there to a carrier, couldn't afford enough to fill my hold, so I scaled back and quickly hit buy.

I didn't realise the scale of the mistake at this stage…

Flew back to the original site, and oh f*ck… I could only sell 10t and I was still making a 200Cr loss. It then dawned on me I must have set the import export prices wrong somehow and I was looking at losing about 80% of my money…

After much swearing and searching, I find a carrier buying for around 200K/t less than I paid, which was still 5x more than the average selling price.

It was 200Ly away but worth it. Got there, but in the half an hour it took to get there it had moved another few dozen Ly away. Race over there, and it had gone again. Search again, it was close, only about 4 hops away. Another quick dash and I caught it – but still lost about somewhere between 45M and 65M Cr in the process. I had to walk away and not think about it too much !

Not quite sure how I screwed up so badly, but boy, am I cheesed off about it !