Everyone wants fast gold. Actually, they want fast money, fast success, and fast happiness. Everything fast, fast, fast. When we stop and think about it, there's a reason why taking things slowly and methodically works in our favor. This is a competetive world, and it's the get rich quick people who aren't will be your stepping stones to success.

So how exactly do you take things slowly and methodically in Guild Wars 2? For starters, you need to learn how to invest in different markets properly.

Step 1: Pick a market.

I'm going to want you to repeat these steps for a dozen markets, but for now just pick one to get started. Determine how much profit you will make per flip and how much demand there is for the item. You can determine the profit by multiplying .85 times the sell price and subtract the buy order price. Volume is a little harder, but you have to look at the number of buy orders compared to the number of listings.

The reason you look at volume can be shown easily with exotic items. I see exotics that frequently have buy orders of 1 gold and sell orders of 10 gold. Yes, you would make a crapton of gold if these items were bought at 1 gold and sold at 10, but there isn't the volume of buyers necessary to achieve such numbers. You could look at the rest of the buy orders and quickly see that most people are asking for somewhere around 2 gold for the item, not 10 gold like the highest selling price.

Step 2: Investing, Not Purchasing

You are investing when you buy from the Trading Post. No, it's not the same as a vendor at the store, but more like a stock broker on wall street. So therefore, smart investing tricks should be used when buying up items you intend to flip.

Purchase with a small percentage of your overall gold on hand. Avoid wandering into the 10% range. I don't care how certain you are of the profit at hand, there is risk with every flip.

Remember the exotic example? Well you shouldn't even be dabbling in exotics unless you have 10+ gold. This will help most novice investors avoid disaster.

Step 3: Pricing

Price to sell quickly, so that will often mean large undercuts. Not just one copper, especially for armor and weapons. Make sure you're still hitting a solid profit, but avoid squeezing every last drop out of your buyer. In most cases, the markets move so fast that it will take a long time for prices to come back to your mark if undercuts strike immediately after you post. Always move for fast sales with great deals for your buyers that still earn you a profit.

If you match the price of what a lot of other people are selling for, then you will have that many people in line before you can sell. In some cases, this means you will never sell. That is why I always undercut, even on super fast selling items. And buy orders work the same way, but in reverse.

Step 4: Cancelling, Reinvesting

Reuse the same markets that worked for you, and incorporate new ones. Reinvest with the same strategy as before, never going over the 10% line per market. If you had 5 buy orders before and sold them all for one particular item, then try 10 this time around. If items did not sell, wait a week before cancelling to see if the market comes back.

Learn from your mistakes!