Guild Wars 2

So I think it would be a cool to share your biggest trading post Flipping flops, or mess-ups, or duds, in which you lost a ton of money by speculating. So I’ll go first

Bonetti’s Rappier – I bought these after the Chest Farm in Silverwastes, They were at about 5g, and then they spiked to 20g the next day…. Now previously before the chest farm they were selling at like 80g.

So I thought well surely they will go up to like 20g-30g or something so I bought about 25 of them at 15g… Well as you can see there now 8g on the TP with probably no chance of going up anytime soon… woops lol.

Trick or Treat Bags – bought them as Halloween ended, for 5s 43c, I thought, Surely they’ll go up like the other years ToT Bags did.. Nope Maize balm was the death of me now there at like 4s and I bought about 4k of them. Woops.

The Flips? Those are about getting a lucky buy order to hit more than anything.

Recently I’ve been trying to pickup lvl 60 armors for 5 silver and sell for 30 silver, a spectacular profit that is mostly based on getting the 1 copper overbid in at te right time.

The Flops?

1. I bet big big big on Watchwork sprockets during the pavillian. Like 20 stacks worth. Zealots wasn’t in the game yet, and they isn’t have a lot of uses. Still I figured they would eventually go up.

I also bought up like 5 stacks of Recipe: Twisted Watchwork Portal. The item is nice to get a new character map completion (or just get a new character to Orr/farming zones quick) and cheap to craft.

Then Anet WTFPWNED me. After Scarlet’s pavillian came Scarlet’s invasions which dropped 10x as much of the same stuff. My stuff was now useless and I took a big loss. (18 months later and these items finally have some value)

2. I tried a buy and hold strategy on Gemstore Dyes. Buy at 30g hold for 2 months, sell for 80g. It worked at first. Then it stopped working: the dyes got ugly and people didnt care anymore. Plus, almost as if anet’s cash shop team was watching prices, every time these dyes moved up, they would get rereleased. Ended up tying up a lot of money time and storage spots for a mixed performance.

3. When will I learn? I bought up 1 ticket black lion weapons, hoping to one day sell at just less than the 5 ticket price, but Anet seems dedicated to rereleasing weapons at the two ticket price. So not only is the big profit gone, but I’ve got to not panic sell at the right time before Anet undercuts me.

4. I panic sold items from the first Zephrite bash when the second Zephrite bash hit because I read bad information on the forums about what was rereleased.

5. I bought Sam and the Commisar’s manifesto at 300-400g per. If the events ever get fixed I will feel really stupid. Will they?

6. Minipet prices only move in one direction, down. Feel dumb for ever buying, at least I didn’t sell and have to buy them again for the new collection AP.

Before the 2nd Wintersday festival, i bought about 10 stacks each of Givers Inscriptions and Insignias. They were abundant on the TP and at vendor price of 1.32s.
I was speculating that they will nerf the droprate for the next Wintersday or they will be required for the ascended armor/weapons.

When Wintersday 2013 arrived, there was no ascended Givers stats, droprates for the recipes were high and to top it off, Anet also took away the vendor value of the recipes and their price on the tp fell to 1c.
What seemed to be a failsafe bet with only 2.5s potential loss per stack ended in a loss of 3g per stack.

And I am still waiting to cash in on my Jeweler500 investments that i made more than a year ago.

Mine is usually upconverting mats. I try to be conservative in my estimates, well below Mystic’s yet yesterday for instance I was only getting maybe 80% of my estimate for output. That big of a difference in output is more than enough to flip a fair profit to a loss.

Sometimes I think the MF is karma neutral since over the weekend I make a killing in promoting Soft Wood Planks. As of now those who jumped on the bandwagon late have wiped out any profit by asking way too much for green logs.

Jumpin Lumpix.6108:

Trick or Treat Bags – bought them as Halloween ended, for 5s 43c, I thought, Surely they’ll go up like the other years ToT Bags did.. Nope Maize balm was the death of me now there at like 4s and I bought about 4k of them. Woops.

I invested in maize balm not exactly good yet as there’s piles of it laying around, but it should be worth more than it is (each one is good for 9 ToT bags, and opening ToT bags gives around 4s worth of stuff, so 4s x 9 = 36s value you get out of 1 maize balm)

Other investments I’ve made that have yet to pay out:
Chaos of Lyssa recipe
unid dyes
several rare dyes
everything ToT bags drop
BL weapon skins
a few Living Story dyes
ascended rings, empyreal fragments, dragonite ore
level 500 jeweler materials (silver, gold, mithril)
rare back items. particularly the named ones (Flame Legion Ritual Book, Revolutionary Fliers, Charged Band, etc.). This was long before these were salvageable. I noticed many of them were selling for like 2-3s (just above merchant value). And some of them had sockets that were worth 20-60s. If they were salvageable, they would give about 50-80s in materials (ectos were cheaper back then). They should be salvageable, I was sure it was just an oversight they would soon catch and fix. So I bought a lot of them. Around 8,000. cost me about 240g. but if that update was made, I would get back around 5,000g. I stored them everywhere, but mostly on the TP (listed for ~50s each, which cost me 200g total to store them there). The update was coming any day now, I was sure of it. 4 months go by. I got fed up and wanted to use the money for other things, so I withdrew all of them and sold to a merchant to get that 240g back. 3 months later, they did an update that made all those rare back pieces salvageable.

Investments I’ve made in the past that have paid out:
Living Story dyes (before they started re-releasing them)
exotic armors that were able to give insignia when salvaged. story: first, they made weapons able to give inscriptions, I figured they would do the same for armors, so I made a list of all the armors that would be able to give insignias when salvaged and bought the cheapest ones. I bought something like 2000 armors for around 50s each. storing them was a pain. the update happened, overnight those same armors went up to around 2g each. But I salvaged them instead, and sold the insignias for like 6g each (~50% chance of insignia), plus there were sockets and ectos. That was about a 5,000g profit (from 1,000g starting).
cloth and leather in anticipation of ascended armor crafting. sold it way too soon, but still made a good profit.

I’m no power trader, but Mini Teq was mine. Bought 2 of them for 15g ea expecting the price to rise at least a little due to the new mini-dedication removing them from circulation. They instead deflated to half of that price as of today.

keeper’s recipe. bought 1000 gold worth of it…. lion’s arch invasion released it again… and my 1000 gold become 200 gold….

it went up to 1000 gold again and i sold it…

I dont’ even know how much those are worth now…. alot, If I didn’t sell it, I probably make 5000 gold.

I was flipping karka shells for a pretty steady profit prior to the April feature patch, and I had about 5 stacks on hand/for sale when the price dropped by 3s each. (I’m not much of a power trader, obvs.) It hasn’t recovered, because Karka Queen is on a schedule and drops quite a lot.

I frenzy-bought up sigils prior to the April patch when the changes were announced.

Used two super axe skins before the wardrobe was mentioned… I wish I’d been more frugal, now. In my defense, the super skins weren’t terribly popular and were quite common at the time.

Ooo I have only one! Not that major but it felt really silly at the time. I just knew the new Krait runes were gonna be a thing. They just had to be so i bought like two stacks at 20 silver each, peak value. Hahaha, complete waste.

Most other ones were decent, some still have to pay out but they’re medium to long term investments, I knew what I was getting into. For now, I stopped investing or flipping almost completely though as I don’t have enough time these days. I still want the Halloween mini, that’s currently eating my resources and my bank space. So frustrating I still have no mini or necklace after opening 80 thousand ToT bags.

I bought like 30 Gem Store dyes at 20g+ like half a year ago or longer and yeah they’ve never gone over 10g since haha.

Good:

Bought 100.000 passion fruit for about 0,15-0,25 s and 1 month later sold it for 1,00-1,70 s.

Bought 250 Exos with the Superior Rune of Strength for about 0,7-1,5 g, salvaged it, got 1 or 2 ektos and the Rune and sell them later for about 14-15 g.

Bad:

Bought 250.000 piece of candy corn pre Halloween-Event for 0,5 s and they drop actually to 0.13 S.

It s like the real economy, sometimes u r lucky and sometimes not.
But gambling is a part of the game and i m addicted to it.

Bought a lot of quaggan tonics during the LA event thinking they will go up, but instead their price halved or went even lower and I finally sold them at a loss. Bought a truckload of silver and gold a long while ago waiting for jeweler 500, but I got really lucky and the second 4 Winds thingie hit and I unloaded all of it for the people who were buying to exchange for festival stuff, so I doubled the money I put in.

Ah, well. Win some, lose some.

The Toxic Spore Backpiece. I bought a couple at their peak around 30g. They dropped fast. Then became available again during the last Four-winds festival. So they dropped even farther. It will be a long time until I can break even on that investment, if ever.

It’s a great skin. Everyone should have one.

Flip and flop in one:

During the ready up stream in march (in which they announced the rune and sigil changes) I’ve bought tons of strength runes in order to cash in after the stream. The strength runes were 0.50 gold before and 2.5 gold after the stream. I told myself kitten it and sold them all. Made a nice profit.

3 weeks later they spiked to 15 gold and.. yeah. You can guess how my reaction was. :P

SkyFallsInThunder.8257:

Bought a lot of quaggan tonics during the LA event thinking they will go up, but instead their price halved or went even lower and I finally sold them at a loss.

Lol I lost hundreds and hundreds of gold on these. I went all in, and failed miserably

And this is why I sometimes call the TP “TPvP”.

I’m not a flipper. The most gold I make from the TP tends to be from me selling lucky drops, but I am still holding onto almost 1000 Unid Dyes that I got for free back during the Great Dye Upheaval, waiting for the price to climb.

And it is, veeeeerrrrry slowly, but I’m thinking of cashing out soon since I noticed that Unid Dyes not only drop from the Personal Story rewards, but they can also drop from Loot Bags from the Living Story. So new supply is not as choked off as I hoped it was. Barring a big new sink for Unid Dyes (which I highly doubt ANet will do), I don’t think it will rise to the price I originally wanted to sell at for a long time yet. The temptation to cash out and use the profits to finish off my Ascended crafting is getting stronger by the day.

Bought BL skins 2 Chiroptophobia and 3 Dreamthistle Greatsword at around 50g last year. Then I stopped playing for about 10 months.
I started playing again a few weeks back and now Chiroptophobia is at 160 – 170g the dreamthistle gs at around 500g. So I guess I got lucky

When I was just starting out, I didn’t pay close attention to the types of runes I was listing and buying. I ended up listing them all at one averaged price, which meant most of them sold for 1/2 their value (and half of what I paid for them), while the others didn’t sell ever and I ate the listing fee.

That bungle cost me almost 75% of the gold I had at that time.

EDIT: Oops, that wasn’t really speculation though. Just me being a dumbo. I haven’t ever lost money out of sheer guessvesting.

I invested heavy in mini’s when they announced the changes to them. I was up nearly 500g then I got over confident and lost it all.

I also sold my 20 stacks of ancient bones for 1.5s which I bought at vendor price after launch. I figured that was certainly the highest they would ever go…

I bought a lot of candy corn this Halloween since there were so many good sinks I thought for sure it would rise… but nope… still hanging onto that though.

I invested in thick leather and lots and lots of jewels since the devs promised that 500 crafting and precursor crafting would 100% be in 2013… still have all that stuff… still waiting…

Flip: Early weapon skins. I think i’ve made almost 7k gold out of it.

Flop: Tonics, lots of tonics.

Flips : markets where I thought prior to acting. Like stopping the game and doing some math. Examples : t6, giant eyes, lodestones, cores, weapons, dyes …

Flops : markets where I panic bought, expecting a super rise in prices in the next hours. Example : Ley Line skins (barely breaking even atm).