A picture of my kidnappers.
On an unrelated note, how do you go about recruiting better quality crew?
I bought a Mercury to have a go at auto trading, but the captain that came with the ship didn't have the necessary rank to auto trade, so I moved over 1 of my auto miners to take command.
Now the problem I have is that I don't have a captain for my auto miner. I've been talking to random people on the station but they are all low level, with most not even having 1 star.
With luck, one (or more) of your auto miner captains will have leveled up to 3 stars in piloting. That captain can be transfered over to your trader ship (via the comms interface). They'll then be able to be assigned to autotrade.
If not, then leave your captains mining until they rank up. I once saw mention of 'Seminars'. This was a consumable personal ware that you could 'give' to a crew member to help them level up. I forget if that was a mod or not though.
One little trick is as follows. When buying a ship, first select 'Maximum Loadout' from the suggested loadouts, and then downgrade it to what you actually need. The compulosry assigned captain crew member has a increased chance of higher starting stats in piloting. If you happen to roll a low star pilot, you can sell the ship back (remember to strip it back to its cheapest components and then
sell it) at cost and try again.
If you're down for a bit of modding, there's a mod called '
Learn All The Things' that increases experience gain rates for captains, crews and marines. Alternatively, there's the
TaterTrader mod which both improves the autotrader default behavour options and reduces the experience requirement to one star.
. 
