buy low/sell high--where to start?

usually i save up my money only to blow it on 1 expensive thing, whether it be 15k armor or a weapon. ive read on these forums that buying low and selling high is the best way to make and maintain money. yesterday i got lucky and had an elemental sword drop for me. i sold it today for 400k in cash. i have had an extra 15 ectos in storage for a long time for i guess what you would call "equity". now with my new riches of 400k+15 ectos i want to join the high-end crowd with lots of money and nice things. i need some tips on where to start....what items to buy to start with, where to sell, when to sell..etc..i want to save for FoW armor for my mes and ranger and im glad that i shouldnt have to go out and farm for hours for my money...now ill sit in a town for hours spamming WTS and WTB but hey, as long as it makes me money =P

What sword drop did you sell for 400k?
I think I really shoot myself in the foot being to lazy to not spam the trade channels.
But since I'm about broke, I either need to hurry up and make with the ecto farming, or figure out how to sell the money things when I get them.

As for buy low/sell high, I do that sometimes. So far I've made most of my loot off of luck black/white dye drops.

a req 11 elemental sword is what i sold for 400k.

I think what the OP is asking, is what items do you look for when buying (in order to sell for more later).

If I were you, I'd hang out in towns and watch for people doing "inventory clearouts" or "cheap greens!"

Congrats on your drop, by the way.

But even though you have capital to invest now, it will still take a LOT of patience for you to hold onto items you bought low, in order to sell for a profit. The people who have made their money this way, have tons of time to make sure they get the price/profit margin they are seeking.

first of, dont try to buy things you are not 100% sure of

try to go in things that are in demand like warior gear, swords, shields etc.
Mini pets can be good too, but dont forget that they fall in price daily and that it has to b eREALLY lower then the auction price to be able to sell with profit

learn the prices on the mods, like how much is +30hp pommel etc, look at the item and try to split how much it would cost by pieces. then look at skin +damage mod (unless its inscrivable)

The first obstacle you have to overcome is the presumption that an item has an inherent "value". It doesn't. The only "value" an item has is (1) its marketability - that is, how many people are actively trying to buy that type of item and (2) what those buyers are paying, on average.

To me, #1 is the most important. How do you determine which items are the most marketable? There are many very good sources:

1. Check out the Buy section of the Ventari's Sell forums. Look for common themes.

2. Check out District TWO (not ONE, but TWO) of Lion's Arch, Droknar's Forge, Kaineng Center and Kamadan. Don't look for the WTS spam - try to find the "BUYING" spam. You'll notice common themes as well.

3. Simply look at your own preferences. Do you really want to have a crystalline sword if it has a 15% while hexed modifier? If the answer is "hell no", then chances are there are many players out there just like you. Think about the rare, non-inscribable skins that you find most desireable. Chances are that other players share that same fancy.

The second step is analyzing price. The key is ONLY to analyze the price on items that you identified in step one as highly marketable. People love the Price Check forums in the Ventari's Sell forum here, and it's good to glance at - but realisticially, the best way to judge what you can sell an item for is to look at the actual bids on the Sell portion of the Ventari's Sell forum. Those are actual bids that people are willing to pay for items.

Another great source, albeit a bit deceiptful, is to chat with one of those "buyers" in the aforementioned towns. Negotiate as if you had the item, and see how much "wiggle room" they are willing to provide you from their spammed price. After doing this once or twice, you'll have a very good feel not only for how much you can sell your item for, but also get a knack for haggling.

In all earnest, I would start out slow, and not target any high-end items just yet with your recently acquired fortune. I would target items that normally sell for between 30K and 50K, to reduce your risk of buying too high. As you get used to it, you'll be surprised at how quickly you can recognize opportunities to buy low sell high.

ty for ur info jetdoc

but why use district 2 not 1?

This is definitely one of my "helpful hints" that I normally don't share...

District 1 has historically been full of sellers. It's a buyer's market, and highly risky to sell in that arena because the chances of someone else selling a similar item to yours is very high (due to the volume of WTS spam).

District 2 is generally where people go that (1) can't get into District 1 because it is full and (2) haven't entrenched themselves into the WTS spam mode. This where I normally see more WTB posts.

The other districts are fine as well, but District 2 is the one that generally has the best combo for (1) being relatively full and (2) not inundated with sellers.

I'm not a huge seller (two mules full tells me I need to sell more...) but one quickly figures this out.

Even with only Trade channel activated--local, guild, alliance, team, all off--the text whips by so fast in D1 that you can't even read it or click on the buyer/seller fast enough to catch them. I'm not sure WHY anyone is in D1, or how they manage to sell anything.

Spamming ftw I guess.

Are you aware you can use your tilde (~) key to open text history? (The key under escape, anyway)
On my interface I have it setup so it's much larger. Don't understand how people can use the defaul "5 lines at once" setup :\. Makes it impossible to have more than one pm conversation whilst monitoring other chats.
--

As for where to start, I'd second the advice given; spent LOTS of time watching the market. I made my first 2k playing the dye market in pre-searing, then my first 20k on Fiery-"I love Rurik"-Dragonswords.


1) The cheaper something is, the less risk you have
2) Never invest more than ~20% of your assets in a single purchase if you simply want to sell it on. Of course, as your fortune extends over 250k, 500k, 1,000k etc you may want to further restrict this.
3) If someone is offering a deal that's too good to be true, then it probably is.

i would say anticipate the market. Buy low sell high is a steady way to earn a living but if u want to get rich quick i'd say study everything about the game. Every press release, everyt forum, everything. Its something like the stock market. I'm no expert but if u get wind of something that is going to rise in price buy that thing in huge amounts, wait for it to rise and then sell.

i consider myself a true a-hole because I pick on the "less-informed" people. Today I bought shards from a guy for 2k each, he didnt realize that they could be sold for 2.3k at the merchant... Well i made some easy money there. Also when spamming in chat that you want to buy shards or ecto, at the end i sometimes have pm price. With pm price they will tell you their price so then i give them some bs and say "Well ive been buying for xxx gold (normally only 100 gold over what you sell to merchant for) so say i said ive been buying for 2.4k and they were selling for 2.6k. Well form there I then say, why dont we sell for 2.5k and we both leave happy, they agree then you can go and sell the shards for 2.6k. Boom your making money, thats some of what I do but im to lazy to do it often :/

That's a VERY good summary guide.

You missed one nifty tool though: The GWGuru auction system! Go there, and check prices that have actually been paid. Do an ADVANCED search for the item you want to buy or sell. Tick the "Search also closed auctions" checkbox. Look through the list of results, and ignore all those auctions that got 0 bids. (Many sellers ask for totally unrealistic s/o values and end up with 0 bids.) Look for those items that have actually been SOLD. What's the average price? What is the price range?

In case of the Elemantal Sword the list of results looks like this. With a bit of analysis you'll see that ALL of the swords priced <500k were sold, often with a very high number of bids. Between 500k and 1M the number of bids decreases. The highest price that was paid is 1M (for a req9).

Thanks for that, but yeah, I am aware you can expand the chat box. It's still far too much chat; and if you have an item which perhaps only an impulse buyer/buyer passing through would like, chances are they don't have their chat expanded.

I dunno about the whole impulse-buyer thing, I tend to hang around in district 1 of any major city and watch the chat whenever i go shopping (which generally isn't often, considering my funds). Most of the time it's just the same crap over and over, so once you see it, you've seen it all.

Try to check guru auctions too, you will find lots of really good deals which people have not price correctly.

I bought a req 9 zodiac shield 44/-2 one point away from perfect for 10k and ended up selling it for 100k+10e

as for elemental swords there is a huge demand for them and not enough ppl have them, unlike crystalline swords...
You can always try to do chest runs, thats mainly how most ppl get the drops that they do.

Dont want to pick on the new players of this game (but i guess that is what buying low and selling high is) but spam things like WTB req 9 golds in the chat and sometimes a "new person" will say they a req 9 max dmg 16% while hexed spear and they will sell for 2k. Usually you can buy a 15^50 inscrip for 3k and sell the 15^50 req 9 spear for 8k-10k easily making 3k-5k gold.

*note i did not use the word noob ^^

Not always, I find a lot of time people will sell low too sell fast, they know what the item is worth, but dont want to spam for 4 hrs to sell for 25-40k, so they sell it quik for 5-15k(just using 'middish' price range ) and let someone else profit from it as well .
Very good tips for the most part,posted by Jetdoc,a quik question about using the second district, do you advise spending your 'buying' time in the second dist. as well ?

Hm trade was always good point to increase your amount of plats. When i had elemental r9 (so ugly) drop i sold it for 400 ectos in game .


Anyway i always look for occasion. Sometimes ppl doesnt know "market" prices and you can catch them as fish. In easiest way... you need to have to check offers when you are entering popular locations, and you need to know all prices from gwguru (Yes, guru cause guru creates prices for items in game. Its so sad to be honest, but its fault of easy days of ecto when 105 build rulled UW)


There are also some stupid thing about being merchant. You can be scammed, so always check amount of gold or ectos. I heard stories about putting mursat tokens instead ecto (lol). When Celestial Sigill was worth more something around 40-60 many scammers tried to sell family sigils (lol^2).

p.s Well "rich" ppl arent elite ones cause they have a lot of plats... I think they are elite cause they know almost everything in game. They are PVE masters. In first place they were fascinated by desing of FoW armor... chaos axe ... stormbow... and thats why build 105 was created (i remember times, when clean white max dmg stormbow was worth 10-15k . But to be honest even your hyper market can bore ya... couple of nights ago i gave to ppl something around 1000 plats, 100 ectos and some perfect items... worth something around 100k plus XX ectos . It was a nice piece of pleasure . So when you earn your plats and ectos share with ppl sometimes. Go to nooberS land start talking with them. Ask them about how long they are playing, and what they think about prices of items. If they "look" really young share with them. Belive me it was worth more than (almost) anything else... .

You know, I had about a thousand words of how to make money typed up here, and well, I got to thinking.

If I can learn in a couple months and have 800k and all my characters equpied(some 2 and 3 times over), well, if everyone did what I did, there'd be no one paying out the sort of cash I deal in.

I'll give 2 tips.

Cheap UNID golds.

You have to balance total gained gold per hour, with what you can do farming.
Entirely too many people don't do that, in addition to not farming smart.

If you farm, don't sell every piece of crap you pick up, vendor everything that's not potentially worth several Plat, then get back out on the field.

Every 5 minutes you sit "attempting" to sell something, is several hundred gold wasted, no matter what build you are or level, you can farm a couple k per hour in just vendorable drops, not to mention gold/mats/dye/gold items.
I can farm that much in pre on lvl3-4 mobs, anyone can find a decent spot or several in post/new chapters.

I'm not saying farming is better, but, it is contributing to the economy, and can bolster sales if you farm smart. If you're selling, you want to have a large of a stock as possible, without getting so large you can't farm anymore when you get bored.
Don't take an empty basket to market, take a half full cart.

i remember back in the betas and just after release when 500Gold meant you were rich...

After 105 build when you had 1000 plats you were only medicore .

first off, im not that uber-rich
but all my wealth comes by luck really
was a guy in la spamming selling nice deathstaff
and i took a look on it
was req 8 bonestaff 20/20 death before nf and inscriptions
bought it for it 10, resold on guru for 100k+70 e

just know some things are worth and you will be rich^^

A great thing for you to become familiar with if you want to buy low and sell high for at least a 5-10%+ profit (the higher priced the item, based on what you buy it for, the more difficult it may become to flip it for a higher profit), is the wonderful art of Haggling for a higher price. That is, negotiating people who want to pay less into a higher price, or compromising.

For instance, I purchased a cheap little Fiery Gladius, req. 9, from a friend in my Guild for about 20K or so. I had a spare 15%^50% inscription laying around, and he tossed a +30 health mod my way for an extra 15K, so I wound up paying 35K total for this sword.

I went to Lion's Arch and after quite a bit of "WTS" I found a buyer. I was asking for 100k +3 ecto - I like to start way up there, as it's helped me catch the attention of some folks who have the money but don't want to spend it (could just be a luck of the draw sorta' thing for me, I can't be sure). This person offered me 80k. I talked to him for a while and he went up to 85k. Talked to him a bit more - "haggling," if you will - until he bumped his purchase price all the way up to 95k. It took a little time and some skill, but I was determined, so I turned on the charm.

I've seen this sword go for a little more than this - about 100k or so at times - but I'm not one to pick over an extra 5k in a deal that is several 100% more than that small amount of money. I turned a profit of 65k, which was almost a 200% inscrease of what I paid for it.

That's an extreme example on my part. For lesser, perhaps more accessible examples you can just browse the forums. There have been plenty of people sharing their experiences when it comes to item flipping (I do house flipping - buying a run down house, fixing it, and flipping it for profit) in "real life" with my father from time to time, so I approach it this way.

Which brings me to another idea; sometimes taking a little time and keeping an eye out for a crummy item with a nice inherent damage mod and requirement, or a nice requirement and inscription spot, is worth your wait. This is only if you're willing to haggle other people down in price on modifications for it, or if you already have modifications.

Look back up at my small example. I bought that req. 9 Fiery Gladius very cheaply - I would've paid more if it weren't from a guildy, but he didn't care much for money, as he's already loaded up on it and simply hoards his cash anyway - primarily because it had no damage mod. From time to time you can find people who are way too lazy to add that mod on, or who just don't care about money themselves - granted, there are FAR more greedy b****rds selling high end items in Lion's Arch or other primary towns than there are these folks who, like me, will sell very expensive items cheaply when they don't absolutely need the gold (I've sold req. 9 15^50 Zodiac items as cheaply as 20 and 30k because gold is gold is gold, and it's easy for me to make). I slapped that 15^50 mod on the Gladius and immediately I was able to sell it for just a bit more. Assembling things cheaply and selling them off as nice products is great.

It does require work, though. I've spent time working at custom car shops, where we assembled beautiful pieces of semi-antique machinery from rusty bodies, chassis that didn't go with what we had as a shell, etc. etc.

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There ARE other, much quicker ways to make money than this, though. Someone said this earlier, and I'll repeat:

Cheap, Unidentified Gold items.

You can usually find people selling unidentified golds of all caliber for 1-2k if they are selling to people who want to increase their wisdom titles. My advice: if you have the extra money and don't mind potentially wasting a small portion of it, buy these up. Even non-max items can have amazing modifications on them. I can't count the number of non-max gold celestial items I've found in Cantha with perfect health, casting, sundering, furious, etc. modifiers. You can sell the mods alone, or you can salvage and save as many as possible to mod up those cheap items that you might want to buy later on.

- - -

Good luck with your stockpiling. There are a million methods out there to make gold. Once you become familiar with them you don't even have to put in a lot of work, which makes getting large amounts of gold easy and accessible even to the most casual player who hates "the grind." All it takes is a little ingenuity (I hate hearing folks whine whine whine about not being able to make money without grinding) and a will to put in some effort, even if it's just one day for each week or month of playing.

No. The best places to buy things are (1) in the Ventari's Sell forum (NOT the high end, just the normal Sell section); (2) any auction site (especially scanning for those auctions about to expire); (3) District 1 of Lion's Arch, Kaineng City or Kamadan.

I normally monitor the WTS spam to see if there is (1) something that is highly marketable that I can sell for more VERY quickly using the techniques I described above and (2) something that I've been looking for.

If you're looking for something specific that is pretty common, posting it in District 1 normally will get you 2-3 responses very quickly. That helps you because you can gauge "how little" you can pay for the item from those quick bids.

If you're looking for something pretty rare/odd, the Buy part of this forum is probably the best place to go. Unless it is an extremely high-end item, I have been able to get most of what I'm looking for for a decent price by posting there.