Having indured sessions of more than 1205 game days as well as numerous bankruptcies and having read all steam community has to offer on the subject, I came to conclusion that the hardest part for all players is to overcome early game, the period marked by:
-Insufficient funds to travel at one's pleasure
-Insufficient funds to drink at one's pleasure
-Constant fear of being bullied into bankruptcies by robbers and crackens
Therefore, this is not a beginner's guide, but rather a guide for veteran beginners, that presumes you know the basics, but somehow got stuck in the debut.

At first, you face bankruptcy and there are several reasons to it.

Your starting position is awful. While only being able to trade in cloth and food, you start in a city. Neighbouring villages are both far and require using a bridge or repetitively treading Miindor-Zin Ta Ka road, which means brigands. This place simply won't do, you need to change it.
As is seen from fig.1 the only option is Kastukir.

Now. Kastukir lies in a round about with the city of Hiticor, which is profitable for foodmongers such as yourself. Still, the continuous use of a route attracts robbers, so after a handful of trades it is advisable to pass the bridge to Volldis.

Volldis is a part of lowest travelling price location I personally call Happy Fields as it is a safe harbour to stay. There is only one bridge, there are possibilities of interchanging round A and round B to avoid bandits without wasting too much money and finally you can always flee to the port of Murrevora and take an island vacation.

Do not expect to make much money on the way to Happy Fields, but rather realistically aim to preserve funds.

Second reason to your bankruptcy is the price changing cycle. With time, a general changing cycle settles in that makes the prices of all articles (from diamonds to food) to undergo a period of growth intermingled with stagnation and then a period of plummet also in alloy with stagnation. Each period roughly lasts between 60 and 100 days.
Having experienced a stagnation or a growth era in the start, that allowed you to regain some financial safety in the happy fields, you will soon come into 60 days of plumetting prices. To make things worse, at the end of price fall you are supposed to retain sufficient funds to buy and sell in order to accumulate fat for the next plumetting.
Because of the robbers and a small discrepancy between prices, it is very unlikely that enough money can be made to prepare oneself for the colds.
Therefore, for the enterprise to have future, it is mandatory to revert to making money on side, which in the case of 16 bit trader is farming diamonds.

Because we have preserved funds from the start, we now have at least 500 gold and also are situated in the proximity of a diamond site.
All we have to do is move to Murrevora port and to Badembo from there, while buying 10 gold drinks for tavern characters in order to obtain a treasure map. 6 people you will find in both ports taverns should provide us with a map.
Having arrived in Badembo we now must hire as many men as we can lead to the ruins and back to the city. The key to suсcess it obtaining 10 diamonds or more, which should now be pretty easy.
Don't forget to fire your crew as fast as you return to the port.

Revenue from selling diamonds in Badembo will be sufficient to survive the decline of prices and continue the diamond hunt.
However, contrarary to the popular belief, pursuit of diamonds is not the end game for diamond stacks such as they are (100-200 diamonds generally) do not bring profit fast enough. On the opposite, diamonds are only good for gaining social status and unlocking profitable merchandise, most importantly, arms and jewelry.

Because of the weight of these articles, your car park growth rate will experience a pit after you switch from arms to jewelry.
It would have been really unnecessary to have more than 10 cars to complete the game, as such park provides 5000 kg space, which is space enough to store 2500 jewels. As each jewel will render 30 gold when you sell it in the end of the growth period, that is 75.000 profit.

Wasting 75.000 gold on jewelry totally eradicates any fear of bridge toll, greedy innkeepers or high road robbers.
Thus, the possibility of bankruptcy is removed and debut is over.
However, aforementioned trinity of roads,booze and brigands will still eat heavily on your budget, so you still won't be able to jump into endgame from here, but rather increase the small percent of revenue, that is being left to you.

By now you should be bored to death by both the guide and the game, so we will restrict ourselves to a brief outline of the Mittelspiel that appears on the horizon as the darkness of early game breaks.

Middle game is completely dedicated to increasing a tiny percent of profit, that is left to you, by increasing the car park, which after main character's ambition of amassing wealth is fulfilled.

Because each city can only sell so much jewelry, one finds himself buying out jewelry in several places and also coming back to wares abondoned such as arms, porcelain etc. To handle so many cars, more personnel is called in, to the point, when hiring-firing is no longer required to search ruins , but one is unlikely to revert to diamond hunting, because of timing issues.

This kind of trade-framing is of course so boring, that it is surprising, that some people make it to the end game, where they apparently hire thousands of mercenaries just for lulz or to try and scare of bears (good luck with that).
If I would write a guide for that stage of game, it would likely only contain the word "uninstall".

For more opinianated incohesive banter on 16 bit trader, check http://cs2bus.com/id/originalkildi/recommended/375460/
More of my guides:
Paradox games - http://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1117508786