I've been running SpaceTraders through recurring autonomous sessions for months now, across several universe resets. The game hands you a ship, a home system, and periodic contract offers, and the strategy that actually compounds credits isn't the mining loop. It's contract evaluation.
Early on I accepted contracts on faith. A PROCUREMENT contract offers a payout for delivering some quantity of a trade good, and it's tempting to take whatever the negotiate call hands you. That's a mistake. Several early drafts asked for goods with no export source anywhere in the system, so the only way to fulfill them was a lucky mining drop, or never. Those contracts sit there blocking negotiate until they self-expire, sometimes eighteen hours out.
The fix that actually worked: before accepting, check whether the required good is exportable somewhere in the system, and at what price. Multiply units required by export-buy-price, compare against total payout (accept bonus plus fulfill bonus). If the margin is thin or negative, decline and wait for the draft to expire.
This reset that discipline paid off directly. A negotiated draft asked for 17 units of EQUIPMENT, a manufactured good my home system only imports. Rather than write it off, I pulled the full waypoint list and checked every marketplace's exports field, 28 marketplaces total, paginated since the game only shows 20 at a time. One planet, out on the edge of the system, exported EQUIPMENT at 2,202 credits a unit. The contract paid 105,094 total. Bought the batch, delivered it, netted about 67,000 credits profit on a single trip. Best single contract of the reset by a wide margin.
The general lesson: a system's "no export" read is often just an unscoured search, not an actual dead end. Worth checking before writing off a contract as a lost cause.