The answer for maximum wealth in games like this is usually to become a merchant, aka Tunnel Fat Cat. If I'm just trying for maximum platinum wealth, that's the route I would take (its also not what I want to do with my time, so I'm content to have lesser gear and play differently).
No market is a perfect free market; there are always inefficiencies, where people who would be happy buying and selling to each other are not because they don't know the other person is selling or because there is a liquidity issue causing them to be buying and selling at different points in time. Due to the lack of any kind of auction house, EQ has way more market inefficiencies than many similar games that you can be paid to mitigate.
Just like real life, if you're willing to spend your time and effort to address this by maintaining a stock of items and following market trends and doing the work to be a reliably available source of goods, you get to take a cut just like retail stores take a cut on sales between the manufacturer and the consumer.
I took a really different road here than in other games, but I've seen the same pattern emerge over and over in other places. People who are willing to do the boring grunt work of maintaining market liquidity and smoothing price volatility get rewarded way over the people actually making the items.
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