I am reluctant to believe that I'm the first person to find this. It was way too obvious once I saw it.
For those of you who don't know, Fable is a very re-playable game which came out on XBox and later on PC with the 'lost chapters' edition. I'm sure you've noticed that for every video game out there you can find a complete written walkthrough of how to achieve all the various goals in the game. There are instructions for how to make money in the game of Fable, most of them involving the buying and selling of a house. This is fine, but takes much more time than the method I found. Again, I can't understand why this method isn't the most recommended. It certainly takes less startup capital than buying and selling a house.
The method is simple. When you meet traders, buy out all they have of at least one item, afterwards, sell it all back to them. Do this in single transactions, no use selling it back in stacks of ten, and do it a few times, buying anything you can buy his entire stock of.
Obviously this doesn't work with weapons, armor, anything you can have only one of. It's best to do this with produce, gifts, and potions. It may help to sell him all you have of that item first, but if you don't it shouldn't matter. Once you've cleaned him out of at least one item, sell it back to him. Now you're probably thinking you should've seen this before. They tell you all the time in the game you can make money buying and selling between the shops, but you don't have to go to a different shop. The traders and shop keepers sell things for a lower price when they have a lot, and buy them for a higher price when they don't have any. There may be a lower limit threshold in the math where buying, say, 20 cider crates and selling them back won't be profitable, but the game tells you how much you're making on the sell-back.
If the transaction doesn't show a profit, there's two possible reasons. First reason: if you bought them all at regular price earlier and now you want to sell, you may not have any profit margin at all. If you sell them to the trader and buy them all back at his "I have so many of these" price, the game will show you a better profit when you go to sell them again.
In all cases, wether you've made money on that transaction or not, buy the entire stock of whichever items you're trading, and buy as much as you can while still being able to meet your needs. The reason is you want to bulk up your inventory so you can profit more each time. The concept should now be simple, but I'll sketch it out in loose terms. You meet a trader and he has 50 cider crates, you buy all of them for 20g each. You then sell him 50 cider crates at 30g each. When he has none they're worth 30, when he has 50 they're worth 20. So you do this until you get bored, but at the end you walk out with 100g extra, plus the 50 cider crates. Later you meet another trader, he has 30 cider crates. you sell him your 50 for 25g each. Then you buy all of them for 15g each, then you sell them backto him for 30g each. Not only do you profit more because you're making Xg on each item, you make more near-exponentially because the traders buying price when he has none in stock stays the same, while his selling price is relative to the number that he has in stock. None of this is relative to the number you are buying or selling, it's all relative to how many he has in stock.
So, buy all of at least one item, sell it back, repeat if it shows a profit, if not don't worry, just get more inventory to work with and try again. Once it's profitable, it snowballs each time you get more inventory, making the money-making more profitable and efficient each time. Simple enough? Why haven't I seen this posted anywhere else?