Making gold in GW2 is fairly easy once you get enough seed money. Ideally you will want to start out with about 1g before you want to consider making any trades. Once you have this seed money then you can start trading on the auction house by looking for items with enough of a difference between the buy price and the sell price for it to be worth your time.
If you are going to focus on reselling, you will need to multiple the buy price by 1.177 and round up to the nearest copper. This is the minimum price you will need to resell the item for to break even (BE). I prefer to multiple the item cost by at least 1.24 (T1).
The reasoning for this is that this is the lowest amount that will give you two opportunities to list that item for resale without making a loss; the auction house will cost you 5% of the listing price regardless of if the items actually sells. The auction house also takes a 10% cut from any successful trades from the seller. There is no charge for placing buy orders.
The first listing should therefore be at the higher T1 price, and then at the lower BE price if the market happens to drop. In an ideal world you would multiple the buy price by 1.306 (T2) as this will give you three opportunities for resale to at least break even and two opportunities for making profit.
As some general advice, if you are attempting to sell an item and other vendors drop it below the T2 price, immediately de-list and offer at the T1 price, if it continues to drop below that, again de-list and resell at BE, unless you are really confident that the market is going to recover. If you are just trying to make a quick profit, simply list it for the first time at the T1 price although this can actually act against your favor in forcing the normal market value down.
Quick reference guide:
Buy Price —-—— BE Price —-———— T1 Price/Profit —-——- T2 Price/Profit
6s —-————— 7.07 —-—————— 7.44/0.32 —-————- 7.84/0.66
7s —-————— 8.24 —-—————— 8.68/0.37 —-————- 9.15/0.77
8s —-————— 9.42 —-—————— 9.92/0.43 —-————- 10.45/0.88
9s —-————— 10.54 —-—————- 11.16/0.48 —-————- 11.76/0.99
10s —-—————11.77 —-————— 12.40/0.54 —-————- 13.06/1.10
BE = Break Even Resale
T1 = ~5.4% profit
T2 = ~11% profit
(Hopefully this shows as columns)
As you can see, reselling at 12.4s with a buy price of 10s will only net you a 54c profit which is hardly worthwhile unless you are dealing in bulk trades. You will want to be making about +10% of your buy price per sale (which means ideally reselling at just over 30% over buy price).
I hope this helps some of you, and please and feel welcome to let me know if I have made any errors in my calculations.
Additional tips:
As soon as part of any buy order is partially completed, immediately turn around and re-list the item for sale at the T1 or T2 price point (which ever is lower than the current Sell price). You are going to make most of your money through these rapid trades.
However, watch out for items with a lot of trader activity as it can sometimes pay off to only list 2-3 of that item at a time to avoid market saturation.
Cancel all buy orders once you are done with your trading session as you don’t want the market collapsing on you overnight. This is a really easy way to lose lots of gold.
Don’t make your buy orders too big. It works best to limit your buy orders to a maximum of ten units for any non-crafting materials, again this helps to prevent you holding too much stock in any item in the event of a market crash.
Choose maybe 5-10 different items that are providing a good margin and rapid turnover and focus on those exclusively. If a buy order is not fulfilled within 30 minutes then you will probably want to cancel that order and find something else.
Test each potential trade opportunity by first placing buy orders for 1-2 or that item and then seeing how long it takes to resell. Again, if you cant comfortable resell within 30 minutes then make a note. I would advise just re-listing at slightly above the BE value just to get your money back in these situations.
(edited by Drafell Moraxi.7543)