Guild Wars 2

So, I have looked this program over and think that it probably has great potential to make me some money off the trading post, but I have one issue with it that has been confusing me for the past couple of days. In Gold wars 2, there two prices of the item: buying and selling. I understand that the selling is the price in which you want to sell the certain item, but what I don’t understand is the buying price. A lot of the buying prices are so low that it will take a while for my buy order to be completed and for me to obtain that item. During this time period, the item will be decreasing in price, and I’ll lose a lot of profit just from waiting for the buy order to be completed. Am I not understand the what buying means on the program? Or am I right that you have to wait until the buy order is complete at the price shown on Gold Wars 2? Can someone clear this up for me? Thanks!
Also, if you think that it would be easier to describe it to me in-game you can reach me at raja aether.

Someone else will have to answer the technical part of that but let me ask you if by “program” you mean something that will work the TP for you? I’m pretty sure using a third party program for that is a bannable offense, though there are some API exceptions.

It is a website…

https://www.goldwars2.com/ ?

to answer your question: yes.
buy order is placing an offer for that item, let’s say at 1g
sell listing is someone offering to sell that item, let’s say for 2g
someone comes along with the item, they can either sell right now for 1g or place a new sell listing probably somewhere around 2g that they will have to wait for someone to buy at a later date
someone else comes up and wants to buy the item, they can either buy right now at 2g or place a new buy order, probably near 1g, then they have to wait for someone to fill their buy order.
it’s all a matter of patience and acceptable prices
‘TP flipping’ is when you place a buy order for 1g, wait for it to fill, then place a sell listing for the item at 2g, then wait for it to fill.
you are absolutely right that you will get outbid on the buy orders and want to raise your offer so yours is filled first, then you’ll probably be undercut on the sell listing, and might want to relist it so yours sells first. you should take these chances into account.
in general, if the margin is really good, you’ll have to increase your offer more. same with sell listing. so if you’re looking at a 200% profit, you’ll probably have to babysit it more than something at a 30% profit. (make sure you include the TP tax in your calculations for profitability. and I usually include one or two relistings in that calculation as well)
the turnaround on this strategy usually isn’t very fast, as you are waiting for other people to want (or want to sell) the item. but sometimes you get lucky: I once turned 20g into 50g in 20 minutes from a single item. even so, this is my least-favorite TP trading tactic. too easy to get stuck with an item that keeps getting undercut, too much babysitting the buy orders, etc.

there are other websites besides goldwars2, and most of them are free. http://www.gw2tp.com/search?sort=spread is one of them (you can expand the search criteria to include other things)

From my understanding, it’s legal to use outside information (such as goldwars2.com, gw2tp.com, gw2spidy.com, etc.) to tell you what you should buy/sell. but it’d be illegal to have it automated to buy/sell for you. As long as you are placing the buy orders and selling the items by hand, you’re good.

I did not mean any automatic program. Sorry if I was unclear about that in my original post.

The buy price for many of these items is pretty low. So, I am correct in assuming that it will take a while for my buy order to fill? The reason why I make this assumption is that a person selling an item would rather not sell the item at the low price, which I set my buy order at, and instead would find it more profitable to sell the item based upon the instant sell price in the trading post. Is there something that I am still not quite understanding? Thanks!

Here’s the thing. Current high bid and current low sale price doesn’t necessarily means those are the prices players are selling to and buying from. They could be localized min/maxes based on the ebb and flow of trading at the moment you look in on them.

There are a number of items on the TP that have ridiculous spreads and profit margins. If you see an item with a sale price of 5+g with only copper prices for bids, believe me nobody is selling to high bidder with that kind of spread. That’s "let me throw a couple of coppers at it and if someone is really, really dumb/distracted/in a hurry then I might get a deal of a lifetime. But that’s not flipping, at least efficiently.

What we don’t have and no site has because ANet doesn’t make it available, is transaction volume or even a range of what prices those transactions were made at. Without those two bits of hard data it becomes tea leaf reading of the charts at gw2tp.com for transaction prices and guessing volume. I’ve compared the volume question with trying to guess volume of a brand of cereal at the grocery store if you simply visit daily and count the boxes on the shelf and try to draw a conclusion on popularity. If you stop in more frequently to count you may get a better picture but it’s still not the information the store gets based on what’s ringing up at the register.

Also demand numbers on the TP can’t be read at face value. How many of those bids are within 10%, 20% of the current high bid versus absurdly low bids. Number of sale orders tend to be a bit more realistic but that still doesn’t mean that all the items are priced for the current trading range. Some may reflect prices that the item traded at but the price has collapsed but the item wasn’t pulled for sale. Some may be the result of long term speculation, X will sell for Y someday so I post it for that price now. Some may simply be there as storage, like renting an infinite storage unit.

Believe me, if it was as easy as looking at gw2tp.com and sort by decreasing spread, nobody would be flipping anymore because the spreads would virtually gone.

Ryan.9387:

It is a website…

Ohhhhh I thought it was just a dig at the game name. My bad.

Mystic, thanks for that explanation of flipping, I never really understood the term before and you cleared it up in a few words.

Donari.5237:

Mystic, thanks for that explanation of flipping, I never really understood the term before and you cleared it up in a few words.

“few” :P I thought I was starting to ramble on, but good to be helpful

Betatwix, that’s exactly how it goes: you might place 100 buy orders, wait an hour, 5 are filled (which you then list), you update your prices and find on 50 you were outbid, so you increase your offer, then go to sleep. in the morning, 10 buy orders are filled (which you then list) and 2 of the items have sold. you check your offers and 80 of them are outbid, you increase your offers. you check your sell listings and of the 8 remaining, 3 were undercut once by 1c and 1 was undercut 5 times to 80% what you listed it for. do you relist? etc.
most of your actual money is tied up in buy orders. maybe 10% is tied up in items for sale. at least that was my experience – and I could of been doing it wrong :P Overall, I made a fairly high percent profit (50-200% per item), but the work just wasn’t worth it for me. there are other methods that could be considered ‘flipping’, such as: buy 100k iron ore at 1s on tuesday knowing everyone does crafting over the weekend so you sell at 1s50c on saturday.

the profit you get from flipping comes from other people wanting gold asap rather than more gold later, so of course you have to wait for them. It’s actually a rather interesting psychology thing about humans. say you were offered the choice of $1,000 right now or $2,000 in 1 year: which would you take? what about $10,000 in 10 years? everyone has their cutoff ($1,000 now vs. $100,000 in 1 year and most people will take the 100k, while not nearly as many would take the 2k). the lottery actually makes a huge amount of money from this. those jackpot winners only get that 100 million in installment payments over 20 years, or they can opt for half of it (50 million) right now.
awww here I go rambling again