EVE New Citizens Q&A

To be clear, trading in Eve has pretty much nothing to do with the NPC's or missions. It's something you do without guidance on the market. You compete with other players, making buy and sell orders, looking for openings, perhaps moving some goods to act on opportunities and the needs of other players.

So there are essentially no missions you can do to be a trader.

That being said, you can run courier/distribution missions for a little bit of ISK and LP, and they're decent for raising standing with empires, if that's something you're interested in.

As for security missions and PVE generally, bare in mind it's one of the worst part of the game. Most people treat it as a means to an end: ISK. (Though trading is potentially far more lucrative)

But I'd suggest taking a step back, to check the big picture. You might consider shifting your paradigm: What do you want to do over the long term in Eve? What do you think would be a fun role to play in Eve? What experiences are you interested in having? Get a vague idea, ask about how it might work, and pursue that, as soon as possible. Many people misunderstand Eve initially, thinking about it akin to other games with win conditions and progressions. If you can avoid falling into this trap, it'll help you move into something fun sooner.

...Or perhaps I'm getting ahead of things, and you're actually just interested in tutorials at the moment. If that's the case, do all the career missions! They're lucrative and a decent intro.

As others have said:

1. Missions. You do them for cash and/or to increase your standings with a certain NPC corp (for example, Caldari Navy), which can lower your taxes in their stations (Jita). Use the Agent Finder tool in-game to find a progression of agents that belong to the NPC corp that you want, and then do enough missions for each agent until your standings with the corp increase enough for you to unlock the next level agent. Whether you're doing combat or distribution missions depends on the NPC corp and what divisions it has (Caldari Navy won't have may distribution agents, it's mostly combat).

2. Trading... you trade. Almost everything on the market is made by players, or at least looted by players. You can either buy stuff (minerals, ore) in the outlying areas at low prices, and sell in Jita, or buy stuff (ships, ammo, modules) in Jita and sell in the outlying areas, or you can just sit in Jita buying low and selling high, because prices fluctuate daily, weekly, or monthly, and especially whenever CCP announces new features or new nerfs. You have to figure out the ramifications of a feature or nerf, and what modules and ships will be affected, but that's what separates a successful trader from a fail one.

But yeah, this game is about 1995 when it comes to PVE... WoW had more advanced quests and NPC AI back then than this game has now. It will get boring. This game shines in the PVP area; devs keep adding ships and rebalancing the PVP, and the player interaction keeps it full of adrenaline and drama, and very entertaining. So keep that in mind when you decide what you want to do long-term.

Just remembered something... If the prospect of being a trader interests you, here's a perspective I stumbled on that helped me, and might help you:

If you want to make profit as a trader, you should think of yourself as a service provider.

All players in Eve are able to do anything they want, with few restrictions. There is no significant barrier to a player if they want to do a thing. And indeed, in lots of circumstances, there is not much downside to doing something yourself rather than paying another person to do something. Therefore, it is unlikely that you and your chosen 'profession' will be seen as innately valuable for some specialist job you perform. After all, they can do it too, and far more readily than how it works in our barrier-filled meat world. In fact, they've also got alts on another account to do whatever it is you're doing.
So really, what reason does anyone have to give ISK?

The reason is convenience. In the vast majority of circumstances, as a trader(and a lot of other 'Eve professions'), you are doing something that others have considered doing for themselves, but elected not to. Maybe because they're lazy, maybe they're in a rush. And often times they aren't doing something because it's cheaper for them to pay, rather than spend the time doing it themselves; their time is more effectively used elsewhere.

All this is why you are a service provider. With that idea in mind, you go about looking for ways that you can make peoples' Internet Spaceship Life easier. Maybe you stock some common-use modules out in a backwater. Maybe you buy all salvage and minerals in that backwater region so that they don't have to bring it to market themselves. One way or another, you arrange a tradeoff between convenience and ISK that is appealing for players, such that they pay you instead of doing the work themselves.

This might all seem silly, or basic, or pedantic, but I dunno, it helped me when I was new to trading. It helped me figure out how to look for opportunity, and get my bearings. Hope it helps you.