Yeah, it's not that major of an issue, not remotely game breaking as it is in Rome 2 (where due to agent spam and the refusal after 12 patches to fix it by CA I've stopped playing the game altogether).

Here you just have other Nation's merchants often just appear out of nowhere and buy out either your merchants out in the field or inside your own provinces right under your nose.

I've taken to killing them, which leaves my leader with a bit of a reputation. ;) And I suppose I could just ignore it, it's not like merchants are my main source of income, but I don't know why, but I just can't seem to ignore having this happen, I find it particularly annoying that merchants from my allies poach up all of my merchants.

So, figured I'd hit the forum and see how others handle it.