Here's a tip for people who don't know how to get Elderman or increase quickly in the game.

Tips:

The sweet spot for any trade goods is 31 in ship and 31 in the warehouse.
I'll use wine as an example:

If you carry 32 wine, you'll get offered a lot less money then when you carry 31.
If you carry 31 wine and your warehouse has 32+ wine, you'll have the same issue.
If you carry for example 50 wine, offload 19 into your warehouse then wait 1 day and you can sell it all for maximum profit (31 ship/19 warehouse).

Ideally if you have a 62+ burden ship, load up 62 wine/furs/pepper, sail to a town, offload 31 units and wait 1day, then sell all the 62 for maximum profit.

Another quick way to make tons of money is when a town is under siege, sail there with a lot of arms and sell it to the inn (don't forget the 31 unit rule)


Beginning:

For an easy beginning start out in Hamburg: there's 26 pepper there
loan until you have 11000 thaler and buy them all.

If you want to 'cheat' the system, sell the 26 pepper, save and reload.
You can buy it again for 450 each (sell at 750)

If you want to play it 'honestly' just wait 1 day, and hope there's still another 26 there.. buy, wait 1 day, sell, wait 1 day, buy/sell etc. until there's only 5/6 pepper left.. then just pay off your debt and go trade with wine.

For income later on you can set cities (always put your home town to 10000 units of warehouses) to build 1000-5000 units of warehouse @39 each, then buy up loads of wine in bremen and hamburg and start trading.
If bremen or hamburg has wine <450 value, loan tons and tons of money and buy up a stockpile of it you'll pay it back quickly anyway.

Trade loophole:

You can also use another trick to earn millions of thaler but you'll cripple the town into poverty-stricken for some time.

Buy up all the arms from the blacksmith, then move ALL of it to another city and just leave 31 arms in your ship. Sell it back to the blacksmith via the Inn, you'll always make around 300+ thaler profit for it . Then buy the 31 back from the blacksmith (on the price list it'll show a higher price then it actually is when you actually buy it.

Using this you can earn infinite amount of money, you can also donate tons to the church for quick support in the town (mayor/elderman status)

Example: in 15 game days (buy/sell + save/reload trick on pepper, then buying all the arms from the town + shipping it out to another town, leaving only 31 arms inside the warehouse buy and selling continuously it to the inn/blacksmith) i made 15 million thalers for laughs (loop hole trading, not hex cheat).
Make sure you sign-up with your guild before earning tons of money so you'll win the election coming up in a few months and become mayor.
After that sign up to all the other towns guils and donate 1 million thaler each to the church and get instantly selected elderman at the 1st election.

Never knew that.

I tend to start trading with Luebeck as the centre of my routes, where I do much of the same only with wine. Because of the short distance between Luebeck and good places to sell wine I can shift the stuff pretty quickly early on. Also, as long as the wine is cheap I buy everything I can afford, instead of just filling my ships. Because Luebeck will run out of wine after a while, and once that happens I can reap the benefits of having a storage house full of wine. At that point I consider selling the wine in places like Stockholm and Novgorod for maximum profit. Novgorod is a long way off, but the low price of furs makes it tempting.

(for some reason I tend to base my operations in Visby. Tradition, I guess. But I usually ignore my home town early on and trade in Luebeck instead. Having good relations with Luebeck obviously helps a lot once I'm elected Mayor in Visby and want to win the hanseatic election. I'm basically guaranteed tons of votes from both towns, maybe even enough to win the whole thing without any real support elsewhere.

Im always focusing on hamburg and bremen, then lubeck/visby.
Since trading wine from hamburg/bremen for furs in novgorod is the most profitable traderoute.

Also here's another tip for money/production stocking towns, load up crew in towns you don't trade in anyways and offload them in towns you want high production/ big monetary coffers.
With a semi-high burden fleet you can offload 1500+ people per trip.
I usually bring Bremen/Hamburg/Novgorod (sometimes Visby/Riga) to about 15000-20000 population.