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[GaxkangtheUnbound]

If you were to buy, then decorate, then sell a trade good to the trader, wouldn't you gain a profit from him?

[ReverseWill]

As far as I know, Traders only do straight-up goods for goods.

Then again, I'm not too experienced with dwarven economy.

[MooUK]

Gax: you'd profit, yes. Enough to be worth the effort? Probably not.

Just make lots of large serrated discs out of your preferred metal and sell them directly. Even a standard quality iron one is worth loads.

[Kidiri]

The best way to up your wealth is with food. If you're using dwarven syrup each single sweet pod produces a stack of 5 ☼20 syrup. If I remember correctly, you can have a stack of 11 sweet pods when having a legendary +5 farmer and fertilize it. This means that you'll have a stack of 55 syrup. Which costs ☼1100. When cooking the dwarves use up to 4 ingredients in a meal. Or 4 stacks of ingredients. So in ideal situations you can have a meal stack of 220 units. Even if all of it is no-quality prepared, it still costs ☼4400. If it's all masterfully minced, it's value is multiplied with 12. So under perfect conditions, you can have a stack of 220 masterfully minced dwarven syrup which cost 220*12*20 or ☼52800. But then again, these are perfect conditions which are near-impossible to achieve.

[AnotherDwarvernDeath]

In the last version, I made millions off of the Giant Cave Spider Silk Narrow Clothing I got from the goblin sieges. Not sure if that still works in this version.

[doctorspoof]

Make rock crafts repeat.

'Nuff said

[ohgoditburns]

If you don't want to clutter your stockpiles, you can do pretty well by buying diamonds, and star rubies/sapphires, then decorating items with them.

[darthbob88]

If you don't want to clutter your stockpiles, you can do pretty well by buying diamonds, and star rubies/sapphires, then decorating items with them.

One of my preferred options, once I can actually afford the more valuable gems. That also works, BTW, with studs made from interesting metals, GCS decorations, leather decorations, etc. My personal favourite method in that vein remains lavish meals made using imported and valuable meats and cheeses, like cave beast meat, dwarven cheese, things like that. If you're on good terms with the elves, buy interesting animals and breed/slaughter them; you get valuable meat, bones, and leather in one easy-to-open package.

[Jualin]

Easy pretty much depends on how you set up your fortress.

Spoiler: All the myriad ways (click to show/hide)

Bone crafts are pretty easy if you set up traps to kill mass amount of farm animals without input, or with only minimal input. If you butcher animals the regular way, you can also get larger profits from cooking the meat, tanning and shaping the hide, and turning the fat into soap.

If you make use of lots of miners and magma furnaces, you can easily get a lot of high quality metal goods, especially considering the current (over)abundance of adamantite.

Miners and jewelers can also get some pretty good results, but mining for gems tends to be pretty chance-based. But when you luck out, its probably the best industry to go with. I've also heard some pretty good things about glassmakers + jeweler combos.

Farming can also provide some pretty ridiculous returns, as previously stated. The one limiting factor on farming is trying to stop the produce from rotting, and thus it is limited by the number of barrels you can make (and thus you are limited by either your wood or metal industry).

Stonecrafting is the simplest to set up. If you've been digging a lot, you should already have plenty of fodder to get this industry going. Lots of item spam, but if you can make enough bins you should be good.

Then there is always that trading of the spoils of battle. Easily one of the single most profitable sources of income when the sieges start scaling up. You can either risk dwarves for this or set up a lot of traps and hope that your foes do not have [trapavoid]. One major drawback to this source of income is that it can lead to stagnation, as dwarves come to your fortress based on the wealth you create. When you sell the traders the clothes of the conquered, you aren't really making any wealth, and thus immigrants are less likely to come.

I've probably forgotten a few and repeated quite a few others.

[Jake]

I second almost everything Jualin said, though I don't recommend selling food until you hit your population cap Clothing isn't a bad idea either, if you don't mind having to import the raw materials; turning a bin of cloth into a bin of even ordinary-quality garments adds a lot of value for not a lot of effort. The only downside is that the moods you'll get out of the relevant professions won't directly contribute much to fortress defence,
And I definitely recommend selling goblin armour rather than melting it down yourself unless you're on a map without iron or copper and tin, at least until Toady One implements the Law of Conservation of Mass, as long as you don't become totally dependent on it.

In fact, now I come to think of it, another easy way to turn a profit is to produce as many different sorts of goods as you possibly can, do that you'll almost always have at least something last year's liaison offered a premium for.

[Retro]

Make rock crafts repeat.

'Nuff said

I do this. It's hard to run out of rock, and frankly, the only real downside is that unless you're willing to give away your wooden bins (I'm not) you spend insane amounts of time marking things to be brought to the depot and traded. But really, a single dedicated stonecrafter can outbuy every caravan I've had yet and leave them ecstatic and still have more than enough crafts to give a sizeable offering.

Then again, I don't really give a crap about what traders bring and usually just order nothing but rare metals. It's easy enough to take care of your own fort.

[Zuboki]

I personally prefer mugs and mechanisms. Sell every mechanism under *quality* (or perhaps -=quality=-, if you mechanic is any good), and keep the good ones for traps. If your stonecrafter hits Legendary, you'll easily buy out entire caravans. Also, if you embark in an area with primarily flux materials, you can allow non-economic use of them and benefit from double-value goods, both in trading and making nobles happy with smaller rooms.

I always keep my bins, as well. I never have enough, even with a legendary carpenter and 3 woodcutters.

[Strangething]

Your profit margin would only be the decoration's value, which is 10 x material x quality. The same as making generic crafts, I think.

I tried exporting mechanisms once, but it turned out they were so heavy that the merchant's wagon got overloaded. I had to buy a bunch of lumber I didn't need.

[Retro]

I tried exporting mechanisms once, but it turned out they were so heavy that the merchant's wagon got overloaded. I had to buy a bunch of lumber I didn't need.

If you're not concerned about what traders are bringing, have the liason order nothing but the heaviest metals and give traders plenty of profit. You can buy their cheap metal easily and in exchange have obscene amounts of space with which to overload them with valuable goods. I suppose that that's where decorations come in handy (no extra weight, extra value), but I'm too lazy to decorate.

[Narmio]

I start with just stone crafts, but upgrade them to green glass-decorated stone crafts as soon as the magma is flowing.  It occupies a fair few dwarves (sand collector, glassmaker, gem cutter, gem setter and haulers) but it doubles the value of those stone crafts and can be used to train glassmakers and jewellers entirely on renewable resources.  Plus, as raw glass has no quality, you can start with several unskilled glassmakers and then when they've skilled up a bit switch all but one of them to making glass crafts etc.  Once gem-setter skill starts getting high I'll do as others have mentioned and start decorating with imported high-quality gems.

When I get appropriately skilled immigrants I'll also run for-profit clothing and metalcrafting industries.  With a high-skilled metalcrafter there's nothing that pumps wealth faster than golden goblets. 

I see high wealth as the best way to get challenging goblin sieges fast, so I try to get as many wealth-improving industries going all at once.  I haven't had time to play a long DF2010 game yet, but I'm hoping that the caverns will allow any map to have abundant silk and underground wood farms that were only possible on cave-river maps before.  I might even try for large-scale clear glass production some time.