In this post we will post what we personally do in order to control hunting expenses and keep it as minimal as possible:
Tips
Hunt with weapons that you maxed in skills, if you do not do this your efficiency will be lower and you will not perform an economic hunt, there are some variable you want to take into account: Weapon Decay (How much your weapon durability will decrease per attack) , Ammo burn (How much bullets you spend per attack, doesn't apply to melee weapons), Damage per Pec (How much pec your attacks cost), Efficiency (The Efficiency parameter is a relatively small component in loot calculations, affected by attachments: no more than 7% of total loot value).
Hunt with armor when it is necessary, if you killing monsters you won't need armor for then do not use it, this will increase your hunting expenses, higher durability decreases decay (raising evade helps taking hits on the armor).
Raise your Looter skills in order to improve returns ("The dev team confirmed that the loot profession only affects loot returns (as stated in the release notes), not loot composition") -- Ludvig|MindArk).
Hunt monsters with valuable loot, with this we mean that you should focus your hunting on monsters that have high markup value on loot, that way you can improve your returns when you sell your loot to players through the auction.
Accumulate loot and sell on auction, why? If you sell directly to players you will not get the right markup for it because most of those players are resellers trying to get as much profit with their purchases as they can, so protect your investments.
Never ever sell loot to TT, only sell to TT(Trade Terminal) whatever you buy from it, if you sell monster loot to TT you are loosing markup value that could improve your long term returns, for example let's say you have 100 PED worth of loot that has 105% markup, if you sell to TT you are loosing 5 PED each 100TT value.
Never ever buy ammo from TT, why? Because you can buy shrapnel from other players, shrapnel when converting to universal ammo provides you with 1% more ammo, so if you buy 300 PED at a markup of 100.5% you get 1.5 PED more ammo, long term will improve your return fluctuation.