Sell more with a second trade port

First, some in-game time conversions (which can be deduced by comparing the "budget month income" to the "hourly income" in the budget window).

• 24 hours = 1 day = 1 budget month
• 288 hours = 12 days = 12 budget months = 1 budget year

You pay 4500 simoleans for one 1000 barrel shipment of oil on today's market. When the oil plant is built, it starts with 2000 barrels.

The oil plant burns:

• 1.2 barrels per 2 minutes
• 36 barrels burned in 1 hour
• 864 barrels per day (aka per budget month) - which is worth 3888 simoleans.

The 856 hourly expense is on top of that, so that's another 20544 simoleans daily.

There should be 86% * 12 = 10.3 import shipments per year. So expect a shipment almost every month.

I would strongly recommend against the oil plant until your city requires over 100 MW. There is no way to scale the plant's costs back, ala simcity4.

The global market tab was originally designed to be a part of the Sim City World window next to the "Leaderboards" and "Challenges" tabs but it was removed before release of the game.

A pre-release version of the window can be found here.

Currently it appears that prices of goods do not fluctuate on the global market although on release day the prices were fluctuating seemingly randomly so it is likely a feature Maxis is tweaking to reduce server load.