Guild Wars 2

Call Me A Legend.4109:

I dont see anything wrong with making money in a way other than grinding. Arenanet even tried to get rid of grinding. Why do you think they would hire an economist if they didn’t want people to “play the market”?

Pretty sure the economists are hired for various reasons, including longterm analysis on the development of gold and gems, spotting potential loopholes in things like crafting and salvaging and spotting deficiencies in various in-game goods.

Oh, and of course, the Gem Store.

This market is not DOMINATED by traders. Most people who trade for their money use speculation, which does no damage to the market. It just sounds to me like someones angry because they made a bad investment

Call Me A Legend.4109:

This market is not DOMINATED by traders. Most people who trade for their money use speculation, which does no damage to the market. It just sounds to me like someones angry because they made a bad investment

Sorry no habla ingels, or at least not the english you’re speaking since it’s nonsense.

I’ve got no further interest in the TP besides selling my goods.
Maybe you didn’t read the fluctuation part, or just completely denying that certain goods have been completely inflated and out of reach for the masses, precursors, silver doubloons, lodestones as good example.

Player who act as traders already admitted that they bought stacks of doubloons and also bought out the highly sought after precursors, then selling them for much higher price later on.

No one cares if you’re speculating on chocolate and carrots and making a bank of it, good for you. It is the certain items that everyone want, that suffer from this trade war, resulting everyone – but the traders, as the losers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if right now there is a trader somewhere that sits on 1k+ charged lodestones and simply dripping them into the market little by little making a fortune for himself.

To put it simply, all items should be banned from reselling, today it’s the lodestones, tomorrow a new patch would come out that result another item becoming the victim.
Creating more supply for everyone, and ending the illusion of high demand vs low supply.

So go find your own lodestones, if you can’t afford to buy ones other people found?

I personally found this to be quite a useful guide. I don’t necessarily want to become a trader, but understanding how traders’ habits influence the market will certainly make me a better informed casual buyer/seller.

I agree with diamondgirl. Instead of complaining on the forums, go farm the kitten lodestones yourself! If anything, a person like you who does not use the trading post benefits from this because you make more money farming.

Actually, the charged lodestones are tanking for some reason. Thanks, everyone else who got on that bandwagon but was a total idiot about it…

The lodestones were not the point, and I get the feeling I’m debating with a 14yrs old.

Creating false supply and demand is not ethical, selfish and is manipulating the market, at times even creating a monopoly on unfarmable / uncraftable items, period.

How is the demand false, when everyone and their mother wants them?

Your guide was super helpful to get me started in the trade game. Thanks, Mandar!

Happy Holidays, too.

Horheristo.3607:

To put it simply, all items should be banned from reselling, today it’s the lodestones, tomorrow a new patch would come out that result another item becoming the victim.
Creating more supply for everyone, and ending the illusion of high demand vs low supply.

Just a couple of points.

1. How would banning reselling create supply? If an item gets locked onto a player after being bought, that item cannot be freed back into the market. The way I see it, that kind of implement would create a greater demand for items since they leave the market but never go back in.

1. Have you farmed for lodestones? “Illusion” of low supply? PAH! Most players are lucky if they can get one corrupted lodestone in an hour (been there, done that). That is the very definition of low supply, and low supply breeds high demand.

Anyways, thing is…while you do have power traders, and yes probably hoarders, in the end the value of an item is not really determined by them as much as you probably think (at least this is my theory). The value of an item is determined by how commonly desired it is by the community/majority and factored against how common that item is to obtain via drop/farming. You take an item (like a lodestone used for crafting the most popular weapons), you give that item a drop rate of 1/hour or more, and you’ve got yourself one hell of an expensive item.

If drop rates were not so terrible for some of these desired items, more people would be compelled or willing to farm. In turn there would be more of them floating out there, which naturally reduces the value. As it is, farming can seem like a vile task, which in turn causes a person to say “ah screw it, I’ll just buy it”. And in the middle of all of that are the opportunists.

Preventing items from being resold is going to cause problems for people who accidentally buy items they don’t want. But that’s not the only way to deal with flippers who buy with low buy orders, then sell with high sell orders.

One thing item flippers do is that they close the gap between the highest buy order and lowest sell order quicker than if you they didn’t exist. Closing that gap is good for everyone except the flippers. The more money invested in flipping a particular item, the quicker the gap closes and the less profit for everyone.

So if you want to get rid of flippers, you don’t make things harder for them. You make things easier. For example you write a tool like Charismatic Harm.9683 is using and provide it for free to everyone. Now watch the profit margins on flipping drop from all the casual flippers competing with each other now that they all have a program that points out the best items to flip.
As a bonus, you also keep the advantages that flippers provide to everyone else.

The price manipulators who make their money by buying out existing sell orders to temporarily drive the price up do cause some harm to the non power traders who buy during the manipulation. But a program that points out which items to manipulate is also going to ruin their day because they have to deal with competition from more manipulators.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

One thing item flippers do is that they close the gap between the highest buy order and lowest sell order quicker than if you they didn’t exist. Closing that gap is good for everyone except the flippers. The more money invested in flipping a particular item, the quicker the gap closes and the less profit for everyone.

Exactly this. The market needs flippers to put the buy orders at 85% of the sell orders for every high traffic item. The further away from 85%, the more attractive the market is to people who flip. If everyone does this, it will never be worth it.

If you have an item that sells for 10s and buys for 1s, you know that this is an extremely low traffic item because no one cares about it. If you see 10s and buy orders for 8.5s, the market is working.

I’ve been doing everything by hand so far, too lazy to actually create an excel formula. Now that i have your document, I can actually keep track of what I do. Thank you so much.

Now just really quick to answer to Snoring. I buy at 1c higher and sell 1c lower, for quick money and not too much risks, as I primary focus on resources that I know people will need. While most of the time, the gap is too small to actually make a profit, in which case, I do not invest, I happen to be making some good money with little effort. So I do not know if this what you call flipping, but it is a pretty good thing to do to make some coins ( so far without any loss).

Meia.6907:

I’ve been doing everything by hand so far, too lazy to actually create an excel formula. Now that i have your document, I can actually keep track of what I do. Thank you so much.

Now just really quick to answer to Snoring. I buy at 1c higher and sell 1c lower, for quick money and not too much risks, as I primary focus on resources that I know people will need. While most of the time, the gap is too small to actually make a profit, in which case, I do not invest, I happen to be making some good money with little effort. So I do not know if this what you call flipping, but it is a pretty good thing to do to make some coins ( so far without any loss).

If you’re buying on buy orders, then selling for a profit with sell orders then it’s what I’d call flipping. To move into price manipulation, you need to be buying out other players sell orders then reselling them at a higher price.

As for 1c above and below, that’s how I started. But I quickly noticed that the good I was playing with had a daily cycle of the price, so I’ve been trying to buy at the low point and resell at the high point. Which means pricing buy orders below the current highest, and sell orders above the current minimum. So far my main problem is that the buy price keeps staying above my buy orders, even as I raise them*. Still, the worst that’s happened so far is that my buy orders aren’t filling.

*Could be another flipper, could be some weekly cycle. One time was clearly someone engaging in price manipulation during what would be the low point of the daily cycle.

I was actually thinking of making a guide like this myself since I have alot of friends asking me about how to make money on the market. It’s nice to see someone else put in the effort to help the community, heck I even learned some new things from your detailed walk through. Thanks on behalf of my keyboard and hands on saving me the trouble :P

Also gotta credit alot of the other post in the area that have given me new perceptive on the TP and working it properly.

Horheristo.3607:

I’ve got no further interest in the TP besides selling my goods.
Maybe you didn’t read the fluctuation part, or just completely denying that certain goods have been completely inflated and out of reach for the masses, precursors, silver doubloons, lodestones as good example.

Wait, I’m not quite clear on this; if all you want to use the TP for is to sell goods, aren’t high prices for precursors, silver doubloons and lodestones good for you? You never need to buy anything, and would only make more money from drops this way?

Or is the problem that you aren’t getting as many drops of those items as you want? If that is the case, it is a sign that your demand is higher than your supply, and if the same happens with the masses it could be an explanation for the high price. Feel free to ask the devs to change the drop rate, but market traders can’t affect that.

I’m making a Google Docs spreadsheet that pulls data from GW2. So far it works well if I manually enter the item ids. So I have some questions:
– Is there any way to get a list of all item ids in the GW2spidy database ? Or at least the highest ID number so I can kludge it.
Edit: I’ve solved this one myself by reading the GW2spidy API documentation, instead of just relying on the tutorial PDF.

- Is there any way to get google docs to separate the digits into gold/silver/copper ?
Having the silver digits in a different color to the rest would be sufficient.

- How exactly does the trading post round the fees ?
The listing fee is clearly done on the total price of your order, but I’m not sure about the direction (round up, down, or to nearest). I think the sales tax rounds each transaction, so I’ll only be able to calculate a worst case.

Finally: here is an interesting find. Completely useless to me, but still interesting to think about.

Note: as far as gw2spidy goes…well I dunno how much I want to trust it right now.

I went to go look up a couple of things and noticed that it was displaying the value of an item at approx 10s less than its current value which is a big difference considering that this item is valued at about 15s but was being shown as selling at 5s according to spidy. This may be just one item, but that’s all it took for me to doubt how much of the other stuff is also incorrect.

Mandar.9813:

Note: as far as gw2spidy goes…well I dunno how much I want to trust it right now.

I went to go look up a couple of things and noticed that it was displaying the value of an item at approx 10s less than its current value which is a big difference considering that this item is valued at about 15s but was being shown as selling at 5s according to spidy. This may be just one item, but that’s all it took for me to doubt how much of the other stuff is also incorrect.

GW2Spidy doesn’t update instantly. So it sounds like there were a few 5s orders when spidy looked, but they were gone when you looked. Either because someone decided to dump stock at 1c above the highest buy order*, or someone started price fixing on that item.

*I’ve seen that happen regularly.

www.gw2spidy.com/api/v0.9/csv/all-items/all < CSV file with the TP data on all items. If you don’t now enough about spreadsheets to be able to make use of it, you don’t know enough about spreadsheets to be a power trader.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

www.gw2spidy.com/api/v0.9/csv/all-items/all < CSV file with the TP data on all items. If you don’t now enough about spreadsheets to be able to make use of it, you don’t know enough about spreadsheets to be a power trader.

Not sure if you are directing this at me or not…I certainly know how to use a spreadsheet :P. In fact I have this really twisted, nerdy love of creating spreadsheets and teaching myself new excel stuff. Thank you for sharing the link to the data, though!

Mandar.9813:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

www.gw2spidy.com/api/v0.9/csv/all-items/all < CSV file with the TP data on all items. If you don’t now enough about spreadsheets to be able to make use of it, you don’t know enough about spreadsheets to be a power trader.

Not sure if you are directing this at me or not…I certainly know how to use a spreadsheet :P. In fact I have this really twisted, nerdy love of creating spreadsheets and teaching myself new excel stuff. Thank you for sharing the link to the data, though!

I was just sharing the link for all to use. I found that, once I had made my spreadsheet, I quickly lost interest in flipping items. So my involvement in any flipping discussion is going to be me trying to end flipping by making it so easy that it ceases to be profitable. Which means if I piece something together like that URL, I’ll share it.

If I can be bothered to figure out how, I’ll make my spreadsheet automatically pull down the CSV. Then I’ll make it public.

I made a killing on the platinum to mithril conversions using mystic forge and then the market changed badly with tier 5 dust being pricer then the mithril price margin (between seller and buyer) . Dust is now up to 40 c from 24 c just a day or two ago. I’m back to forging rares to sell on the TP. With the formula: Lowest Seller – Highest-Buyer / 2 + Buyer. Basically, the mid point formula. Should I start matching buyer or going below him by a penny instead? I feel it would take me longer to sell rares that way instead what I’m doing now. Especially on huge margins like 24s and 65s between Seller and buyer. Using the example here: 65-24 = 31 /2 = 15.5s + 24 = 39.50 s sell price.
It will sell, but then after taxes, it will be only 35s 55 c.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

I found that, once I had made my spreadsheet, I quickly lost interest in flipping items. So my involvement in any flipping discussion is going to be me trying to end flipping by making it so easy that it ceases to be profitable. Which means if I piece something together like that URL, I’ll share it.

If I can be bothered to figure out how, I’ll make my spreadsheet automatically pull down the CSV. Then I’ll make it public.

Interesting! Not sure I am connecting the dots in a logical sense though. You found you don’t like flipping items….so you want to find proactive ways to ruin it (profitability) for other people. I guess I am missing the middle part about WHY :P.

On that note, I think it is also interesting that you think that commodities and the profit thereof would cease to exist if the public had more knowledge…as if knowledge would remove the whole supply and demand part. In other words, while I do believe that when you have more and more flippers out there it might be harder to find an opportunity to seize upon as the trader has more competition, I do not believe that supplying knowledge will ruin the market. There will always be supply and demand, and there will always be items being bought and sold, and no one will ever agree on a single price as long as a public TP exists. There will always be buyers who don’t agree that the sell price is fair and therefore offer much lower, there will always be sellers who want to make a buck, and there will always be impatient buyers who don’t give a kitten about the difference.

Mandar.9813:

On that note, I think it is also interesting that you think that commodities and the profit thereof would cease to exist if the public had more knowledge…as if knowledge would remove the whole supply and demand part. .

For flipping to work, it requires a large enough gap between buy and sell orders that you can buy on the buy orders then resell at the sell order price and make a profit. But to do that quickly, you overcut the highest buy order and undercut the lowest sell order, bringing them closer together. The more people flipping an item, the closer the gap gets as the under/over cut each other.

Make it easy to find the largest gaps and more people will flip the item. Thus the more people flipping, the lower their profit margins.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Mandar.9813:

On that note, I think it is also interesting that you think that commodities and the profit thereof would cease to exist if the public had more knowledge…as if knowledge would remove the whole supply and demand part. .

For flipping to work, it requires a large enough gap between buy and sell orders that you can buy on the buy orders then resell at the sell order price and make a profit. But to do that quickly, you overcut the highest buy order and undercut the lowest sell order, bringing them closer together. The more people flipping an item, the closer the gap gets as the under/over cut each other.

Make it easy to find the largest gaps and more people will flip the item. Thus the more people flipping, the lower their profit margins.

But this gap closing you talk about happens anyways. It is the natural trend of any highly-traded item in the TP. Item has decent profit margin, so people start placing buy orders, orders come in and people start listing, other peoples orders come in and undercut, more orders come in, more undercutting.

This behavior is just natural. An item with a high demand and high trading rate always fluctuates in value, where you see order and sell come closer and closer. What happens when that gap yields no more profit? People stop ordering and listing, and that results in the supply dropping and interest in that market temporarily decreases. What happens then? Lower supply stipulates that demand goes up and thus value increases, and eventually there is profit again. It’s constant roller coaster. It happens no matter what.

Mandar.9813:

I do not put all my eggs in one basket.

I’m not a young man anymore, and I can tell you of my experience. In all aspects of life, those who are successful are simply lucky gamblers or people with the odds stacked in their favour (some may call these latter persons “nepotists”, but we won’t dwell on those in this post).

Those of self-made wealth invariably state the same thing; “I was in the right place at the right time”. It is all about luck and risk.

From my experiences I have concluded that if you aren’t willing to put all of your eggs in one basket, then you will not get-rich-quick. It is as simple as that.

Mandar.9813:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Mandar.9813:

On that note, I think it is also interesting that you think that commodities and the profit thereof would cease to exist if the public had more knowledge…as if knowledge would remove the whole supply and demand part. .

For flipping to work, it requires a large enough gap between buy and sell orders that you can buy on the buy orders then resell at the sell order price and make a profit. But to do that quickly, you overcut the highest buy order and undercut the lowest sell order, bringing them closer together. The more people flipping an item, the closer the gap gets as the under/over cut each other.

Make it easy to find the largest gaps and more people will flip the item. Thus the more people flipping, the lower their profit margins.

But this gap closing you talk about happens anyways. It is the natural trend of any highly-traded item in the TP. Item has decent profit margin, so people start placing buy orders, orders come in and people start listing, other peoples orders come in and undercut, more orders come in, more undercutting.

This behavior is just natural. An item with a high demand and high trading rate always fluctuates in value, where you see order and sell come closer and closer. What happens when that gap yields no more profit? People stop ordering and listing, and that results in the supply dropping and interest in that market temporarily decreases. What happens then? Lower supply stipulates that demand goes up and thus value increases, and eventually there is profit again. It’s constant roller coaster. It happens no matter what.

All true. But what you don’t seem to get is that flipping shrinks that gap. The more people flipping (relative to the number of other trades), the more they close the gap and the less profitable flipping becomes.

I have a question. Is it viable for me to place buy orders in one session and then sell in another? For example, I spend 30 minutes putting buy orders at night, then after waking up, I collect those buy orders and let them sell throughout the day. Or do the prices change too much to make this viable?

Sxiene.5846:

I have a question. Is it viable for me to place buy orders in one session and then sell in another? For example, I spend 30 minutes putting buy orders at night, then after waking up, I collect those buy orders and let them sell throughout the day. Or do the prices change too much to make this viable?

It depends what your buying; something that has high supply/demand and is very stable like say green wood logs will not change. But if you find something with greater than say 30% margin (rare) than you will want to sell asap before that goes away.
What I’m doing right now
Is investing about 80% of my gold into items that will get me 15%-20% margin after taxes then taking the other 20% and putting it into stuff that gets about the same margin, but with a much quicker turnover so I sell that asap.

there is an easier way! although i love some of your tips; and will change some of my strats.
use: http://www.guildwarstrade.com/
it does the calculations for you it tells you what is in high demand and low; just like a stock market set up (the real life one)

i now make 25silver a day with just using this website as referance to what to buy (& at what price) and when to sell it for to make a profit!
(i have to do the calculations on my own though)

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

- Is there any way to get google docs to separate the digits into gold/silver/copper ?
Having the silver digits in a different color to the rest would be sufficient.

This equation might get you started. I got bored the other day and decided to see if I could get my spreadsheet to take one number and break it down into its parts.

=if(Q14=“—”,“—”,if(len(Q14)>4,mid(Q14,1,len(Q14)-4)&"g “&mid(Q14,len(Q14)-3,2)&”s “&right(Q14,2)&”c",if(len(Q14)>2,mid(Q14,1,len(Q14)-2)&"s “&right(Q14,2)&”c",Q14&“c”)))

Where:
-Q14 is the cell to the left of the cell I’m working in
-Values of "--" are just checks to see if one of my OTHER checks replaced the data

Note: You may have to change the format of the cell as well to “rounded with no decimal places”. Otherwise….you might get some funky numbers, lol. :-)

I hope this helps.

Svarty.8019:

Mandar.9813:

I do not put all my eggs in one basket.

I’m not a young man anymore, and I can tell you of my experience. In all aspects of life, those who are successful are simply lucky gamblers or people with the odds stacked in their favour (some may call these latter persons “nepotists”, but we won’t dwell on those in this post).

Those of self-made wealth invariably state the same thing; “I was in the right place at the right time”. It is all about luck and risk.

From my experiences I have concluded that if you aren’t willing to put all of your eggs in one basket, then you will not get-rich-quick. It is as simple as that.

While your generalized philosophy is touching, I think you might miss the more realistic aspects of putting all your eggs into in to baskets as it pertains to market trading.

As far as GW2 Market Trading, putting all your eggs into one basket means using all of your liquid capital to buy into one item. This notion is just silly. Consider that when you list something, you will always be undercut because someone else is always trying to undercut to sell. Then you have to evaluate whether that undercutting will significantly move the sell cost lower than your initial planned sell cost, or even your initial profit investment.

Basically, with the way market shifts and drops and raises by responding to players who are also responding to opportunity, it wouldn’t make sense to invest all of your money into one item as it goes on its roller-coaster of value, otherwise you end up with moments where you are just waiting and waiting for the market to shift back into your favor. Better to have your finger in many pots so that you are always hitting a good market. That’s just smart trading.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Mandar.9813:

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Mandar.9813:

On that note, I think it is also interesting that you think that commodities and the profit thereof would cease to exist if the public had more knowledge…as if knowledge would remove the whole supply and demand part. .

For flipping to work, it requires a large enough gap between buy and sell orders that you can buy on the buy orders then resell at the sell order price and make a profit. But to do that quickly, you overcut the highest buy order and undercut the lowest sell order, bringing them closer together. The more people flipping an item, the closer the gap gets as the under/over cut each other.

Make it easy to find the largest gaps and more people will flip the item. Thus the more people flipping, the lower their profit margins.

But this gap closing you talk about happens anyways. It is the natural trend of any highly-traded item in the TP. Item has decent profit margin, so people start placing buy orders, orders come in and people start listing, other peoples orders come in and undercut, more orders come in, more undercutting.

This behavior is just natural. An item with a high demand and high trading rate always fluctuates in value, where you see order and sell come closer and closer. What happens when that gap yields no more profit? People stop ordering and listing, and that results in the supply dropping and interest in that market temporarily decreases. What happens then? Lower supply stipulates that demand goes up and thus value increases, and eventually there is profit again. It’s constant roller coaster. It happens no matter what.

All true. But what you don’t seem to get is that flipping shrinks that gap. The more people flipping (relative to the number of other trades), the more they close the gap and the less profitable flipping becomes.

You have a valid point, but what I think you don’t grasp is the natural responses a market makes to an item losing profitability. It stops becoming desirable only for long enough for it to no longer be an item ppl are currently interested in trading in. When that happens demand goes back up again.

There are some items that just plummet altogether, but that tends to happen with items that become more easily supplied. When it comes to items that have a low drop rate then the market isn’t really determined by the buyers and sellers, but by the number of those items being gather which shifts based on fame population, events, etc.

Nice write up. I’ve been buying items at around 12-2 AM GMT -08, PST. I log on at 3pm and collect everything I’ve bought (25-50 buy orders) and sell all of my items. I sell everything at this time because, this is when player log-ins spike. My supply will be in the market, and there will be more demand for it. Like people going to restaurants during their 1 hour lunch break. Everybody wants to have their meals now. I supply the GW2 players with my items that I have bought for less, 12 hours before I sell them. I can come up with a 1-5gold profit with a 10gold investment.

Now, I’ve tried your strategy of purchasing buy orders of 250 different crafting materials. Practically everything that are quick buys and sells are roughly around 1-7copper profit per a single 1. Why would that be worth my time, or is there something I’m missing?

PS, Thank you so much for the spreadsheet.

Noob question here: Spidy and GWT both list items trending up and items trending down. I unfortunately find no indication of when I should be buying or selling these items from the values given. IE buy now because the price is dropping? Or buy now because the the price is increasing dramatically? I should perhaps add that I never have any of these items at any given time and plan to flip or hold for a while. But I don’t enjoy holding.