Here are two crucial things to consider:

1. Cost of Lowest Tier Crafting Mats Will Rise

Why? Because tier one mats are the cheapest way to get your crafting daily completed (which contributes to you getting more laurels). I tested and you do not need to gain experience in order to get credit towards the daily crafting achievement. It's easy to buy a bunch of logs and turn them into planks, for example.

2. Dyes May Not Be Effected At All

It seems like grabbing the bag of tier 6 crafting materials and even more so one of the tools is a far better deal than buying dyes. You would be better off selling the results of buying other items in order to buy dyes for a cheaper exchange rate. As long as that remains true, this should not hurt the dye market at all.

I ran around last night collecting momentos from fallen refugees and reconstructing signs, but haven't really gotten into all that this patch has to offer yet. Most of my night was spent scouring the auction house looking for any recent changes. 

Here's my crazy backwards logic as to why Unidentified Dyes will actually spike in price, despite my earlier predictions that they would crash hard... remember this post on Arenanet's "Blunder" ?

NOTE: In the two hours that I got to play, dyes started at 18 silver and tanked down to 16 silver. So I wouldn't advise acting on my speculation unless you are ready to accept massive losses as a possible consequence!

Just because you get a bunch of free dyes from your laurels, does not mean that you got the exact dyes you wanted when you opened them up. Sure, some of the people who buy dyes will just be dumping them on to the trading post for some fast money. But I think that most people who buy dyes will open them up in the hopes of getting specific, expensive ones. When they fail to get the dye they wanted, it is entirely possible that they will spend some gold if they are out of laurels.

This could, if only temporary, lead to a rise in the price of unidentified dyes during this weekend. I would think that afterwards the price would surely begin to diminish as all those people eventually break down and buy the dyes they want or end up getting them from identifying dyes. Once demand is gone, the constant supply of new dyes from laurels will drive the price down. This could be an opportunity, what do you think?

Another factor is what you can get besides dyes for your laurels. If you want straight money, you are much better off grabbing one of the gathering tools. I think it would go tools > dyes > tier 6 crafting materials at this point in the marketplace. But I haven't opened a tier 6 crafting bag yet to know how much is within it.





More analysis is required... I look forward to this weekend.


Are you enjoying the patch so far?

UGH! I am dying to play the latest patch for Guild Wars 2, but I'm staring at 5,700 files to download and it's going soooo slowly! I am afraid I may only get an hour or two of gaming tonight at best.

Here's hoping I can uncover some juicy information in that time, but I'm already well behind anyone who downloaded and played since last night.

Anyone more fortunate than I who wants to shed their own 2 cents on the latest patch? Gives anyone like me who is waiting for the download to finish something to do!

EDIT: I'm in the game and will have a post on the new laurel system tomorrow. See you then!

Flame and Frost: Prelude patch has launched by the time you read this, but I am probably still sleeping! It should have gone live by 3:00 AM my time, but there was no way I was staying up! I hope that you are enjoying the new patch, and I will take this afternoon to scour the changes and find the latest and greatest opportunities for profit.

Be sure to check the following sites to find information about the new Flame and Frost patch:

Official Forums
Reddit
Guild Wars 2 Guru
Guild Wars 2 Insider

And of course, try out the Community Forums on this site for speculation and current strategies. If you cannot afford to join, fear not, because I will be holding contests in the near future to give people access to our forums. Stay tuned and enjoy Flame and Frost: Prelude patch!

(Also read my blog roll for a host of sites that cover GW2 information)

I found this gem on a new blog that is really impressing me so far! The Egg Baron released a post that contained the best spread sheet I've seen for turning skill points to gold. You may remember my coverage of this topic when I discussed Silk and Gossamer. How would you like to see a whole lot more examples of turning skill points to gold?

Check out the Egg Baron's spreadsheet!

If you're big on spreadsheets, you'll also love the new spreadsheet that recently appeared on our forums. It covers extensively how best to salvage for ectos and sell them.

If you have spreadsheets that you found useful, please leave them in the comments below!

1. Flip Individual, 1 S to 2 S Profits
2. Flip High Volume, 30-99 C Profits
3. Multiple Steps to Final Product, 1 S to 2 S Profits
4. Multiple Steps to Final Product, 30-99 C Profits

These are the four areas I have identified as evolutionary steps for all auctioneers. Often times, I hear people tell me about how they are doing the #1 step until finally it gets boring. They ask me how to move on and I recommend increasing volume but shooting for smaller profits per transaction. They they get tired of these flips and I tell them to move on to either crafting or bag opening. Finally, when they are ready to become masters at the trading post, I have them crafting on a grand scale.

These are the general steps of progression as people become better at the trading post. Where are you at?

Value of Failure. Did you learn anything today? Seriously, you should always answer this question with a yes, regardless of the topic. With regards to playing the trading post, you should be able to identify a lesson learned each and every single day.

Obviously, if you sell something then you will probably state that you learned that something could sell. What about when you didn't sell an item? Will you complain that you've learned nothing? Instead, you should consider the factors that went into the item remaining unsold, just as you should look at the causes behind successfully selling. This isn't hard to do, but equating failure to learning nothing will make it impossible to learn from your mistakes.

When I don't sell something, I seek to understand why that was the case. I see every item as worth something, and I avoid the use of absolutes all the time (except with that sentence). Saying nothing sells or it always sells are equally bad statements. Identify why something did or didn't sell and you'll start learning how to improve on the GW2 trading post.

*NOTE: I am not the author of the Gold Wars 2 Tool. That powerful trading post scraper is operated by Tim, also the owner of GoldWars2.com.*

Gold Wars 2 has officially been released for over a week now, and approximately 100 members of this website have purchased access to it already. But I'm sure there are plenty of readers here holding out to see if this product is truly worth investing in. Today I'll bring up a few common questions and answer whether or not this tool is going to exceed your expectations.

1. Will I get banned for using Gold Wars 2?

No you will not get banned for using Gold Wars 2. Arenanet supports the use of scrapers as long as they use the same API code as GW2Spidy, which Gold Wars 2 adheres to.

2. Why would I pay for a scraper tool?

There are plenty of free scrapers on the internet, including guildwarstrade and gw2spidy. However, there is a lot of room for improvement on speed, quality of results, search criteria, etc. Having a better tool means better results, and Gold Wars 2 is far enough advanced that the price is justified. Charging money for Gold Wars 2 also means that the number of people using it is naturally restricted. The tool is fast, the results useful, and the search criteria incredibly well thought out. I also like how Tim has incorporated additional features to the site to help you make gold beyond just scraping and continues to work on improving/innovating the tool's algorithms.

3. So can you make gold fast with Gold Wars 2?

I've had a lot of success with this tool, but I'm more interested in what other players have done. Every person who purchased the tool has continued to use it, but I have no emails yet from happy customers other than one that simply stated "This tool is Awesome!" While that kind of feedback is appreciated, I do not have any quantifiable results yet. Anyone who has used the tool and wants to email me or comment below, please feel free! I feel like I served everyone an outstanding meal, and instead of telling me that you like it, you're not wasting any time between bites!

For anyone who hasn't seen the inside of this incredible tool, go check out Gold Wars 2 today!

I believe that holiday tonics will follow the pattern of what happened for the Endless Halloween Tonic. Endless Toy Maker's Tonic is around 30 gold buy out currently, but the one from Halloween is up to 230 gold buy out! If I'm right, then the Endless Toy Maker's Tonic will go up within a few months as well.

Might be worth picking up now while there are a few dozen on the trading post.

If you've got the gold to burn, buy one or two and let those collect dust for 3+ months.

Same with other holiday items that should rise just as the Halloween ones did.

When you look at the above screen shot of Vital Bronze Plated Inscription, what do you see? Do you see 19 silver in profit? I sure do! That was just one market that I played last night because it was trading for almost three time the highest buy order. Anytime that is happening, even if it's a few copper, I am totally playing for keeps.

So I placed 100 buy orders and won 64 in an 18 hour period. Then I posted and sold in just three hours. What a waste of time, huh? 21 hours for 19 silver! Actually, it was more like a minute of work for 19 silver. At that ratio, I'd make almost 12 gold per hour for just two 30 minute sessions. I think we all can manage that.

What made all this possible? Volume. Some of my favorite methods to make gold start with selling hundreds and yes thousands of copper items.

Apply this information when you dabble in the Trading Post and you'll be successful eventually. Oh and use Gold Wars 2 to find markets faster that pay out like Vital Bronze Plated Inscription.

Over the weekend I flipped Unidentified Dyes by buying on Friday (13-14 Silver) and selling on Sunday (18.50 Silver). It was incredible how they just kept going up in price, even after I announced on the blog to watch out for these as well as tier 5/6 materials. This was due to the Bot Ban Wave as well as the fact that this past weekend was a holiday for many Americans.

I actually blew it and sold the majority of my inventory early Sunday, but luckily held on to some of it for the push to 18.50 Silver.

I am very curious to see if Unidentified Dyes continue to rise in price. If they do, then the bot ban wave was the reason for their increase. If they do not, or even fall significantly, then the added players over the weekend made up for at least part of the upswing in value.

What's your take on this and do you have any predictions?

Have you been investing in tier 5 and 6 materials the past two weeks? Well, you probably should have been, because new bot ban waves were getting implemented over at Arenanet headquarters.

I saw a pretty good post today that summed up the recent markets for each of the tier 6 materials:

Blood | Venom | Scales | Dust | Totems | Claws | Fangs | Bones

Credit for those links can be found here:  Tin Foil Economist Theories. [Reddit/r/GuildWars2]

On the Private Forums we brought up the rise of tier 5/6 materials right as they were happening, and hopefully you were among the people in the know at that time. Right now, I think there's still a small margin of profit to be made, only because tomorrow is a holiday in the United States. That means more people than usual will be online to purchase these materials and push the price slightly higher.

I have no idea if the price is going to plateau or potentially drop after monday though. I am therefore publishing this post over 12 hours early to give you all a headstart. Grab items with buy orders and sell with 1 copper undercuts or more depending on the profit margin. Also, remember not to ignore the tier 5 materials as well as unidentified dyes.

If you want to be risky, purchase with buy orders and then list your items 10-20% higher than the current lowest price. So if the price is 5 silver buy order and 10 silver sale order, put a buy order for 5 silver and then list at 12 silver even though there are tons beneath you. That way you don't have to be online waiting for the price to rise. Up to you how you decide to play this!

Good Luck and Happy Hunting,

Markco

Exquisite Snowflakes have been selling rather well for me. Not tons of profit, but 5 silver earned for 20 silver invested isn't terrible.

I wonder if someone will buy them all out and list for 10 gold like they did last time I mentioned a winter item... hmmm...

All that being said, don't give up on Christmas or even Halloween items just yet. Many of them still make a great profit.

This 30 day series of posts will showcase my absolute favorite items to flip in Guild Wars 2. If you need help identifying what's worth playing, or just need ideas of where to get started, then this is the place for you. Also keep in mind that a lot of the items worth flipping are also worth crafting!

Market #17: Reyna's Set of Gear

Finding one or two items with a solid profit margin from the same set is rare, but 5/6? I'll take that any day!

Remember to check out my Guild Wars 2 Gold Guide if you're lost.

For the rest of the 30 markets, check back regularly and look at the "30 Markets in 30 Days" label on this site.

Gold Wars - Ever wonder what would happen if you could search on the Trading Post with search criteria like "profit margin %" and "demand"? Now you can, with this beastly new tool!

For those of you who waited almost a week for this to be ready, I'm sorry! But at least now you can obtain access and use it to make gold on the trading post right now.

Any time an item becomes easily accessible to the general population and the demand remains the same then its price will decrease proportionate to the increase in availability.

I am thoroughly disappointed with the Guild Wars 2 economic staff if they have no plan to offset the devastating effect that free dyes will have on the game. Supposedly you are going to be able to pick up a crown every day and ten as a reward for some monthly achievement.

Great, so 5 of these crowns (price subject to change as stated by Arenanet already) will reward you with 10 unidentified dyes (also subject to change).

Now, I get around 2 unidentified dyes per hour of straight farming. That's an easy 10 silver as long as I don't identify them. For newer players, it is a great way for them to get access to an item even max level characters will buy. In other words, it is excellent starter income and a bonus for people at max level.

So what will the price be after this change? I'm thinking that if I used to get 2 per hour, and now I will get an additional 10 every two days, that I'll end up with something like 18 dyes every two days. Compare that to only 8 dyes normally and you have a 225% decrease in price. So what will Dyes be worth a week after this change? Probably somewhere around 200%-300% price decrease.

Only good thing about all this is that most people don't stockpile unidentified dyes for speculation purposes and instead either sell or identify upon finding them.

I will take back all my criticism if ArenaNet is also planning on increasing the number of dyes available in the game. It's going to take a lot of them to make up for the new number of unidentified ones, but I shouldn't judge too quickly.

They could also tweak the numbers to make the drop in price less dramatic, as in the number of crowns per day, the cost for 10 dyes, and even the number of dyes rewarded for the turn in.

This video will hopefully help those of you frustrated by being unable to flip Exotic items on the Trading Post. I feel bad because I talked so much about fast flipping that most of you probably just tried to use the same strategy on Exotics... with tragic consequences.

Being successful with Exotics is all about competitiveness. You need to undercut harder, sell lower, and basically bloody your opponents through pricing. The one copper under/over cutting you're used to isn't going to work in the big leagues.

NOTE: The paid scraper tool that I mention in this post is now officially live and useable! Thanks for your patience!

Gold Wars [Paid] - Ever wonder what would happen if you could search on the Trading Post with search criteria like "profit margin %" and "demand"? Now you can, though it does cost money for this beastly tool.

Good:
Novice flippers will find it useful but the really good flippers will dominate with this information. No free tool is up to this standard, and the owner has assured me that he is going to continue to innovate and improve upon his paid product.

Customization, Customization, Customization. This tool lets you customize the crap out of your search. By far that's the best part of utilizing it.

Bad:
At first I noticed that there was no advice for players that purchased this tool. I contacted the owner and he took the time to create a tutorial which shows you the ins and outs of his product, as well as some thorough instructions that even beginners can put to use. I think that even players who never touched Guild Wars 2 in their life could use this tool and make gold faster than any other method.

It costs money! Obviously not a good thing, but I believe that the fewer people who use this tool, the better it is for those of us who have it. The competitive advantage you get is ridiculous. I recommend using a second monitor to display the Gold Wars 2 site while playing the trading post so you don't have to alt tab.



GW2TP [Free] - Best for new flippers seeking easy markets.

Good:
Definitely stay tuned because I think this site has a lot of potential. Right now it's just one search for all flips that will net you 4 copper or more that also have 750+ sell count. Despite having just one search permanently embedded into the site, I found it incredibly useful for identifying new markets to flip in. Since the listed items have so much demand, I quickly made a profit of 47 silver in 10 minutes using this tool. That included buying AND selling the items I flipped. Not too bad huh?

The looking for group section looks pretty interesting, and I would highly recommend taking a peak at it. Overall, the site shows a lot of promise!

Bad:
Data updates every 10  minutes so it is not as accurate as some of the real time scrapers. But it's also much faster since you don't have to run a new query with each page refresh. The site is new so there isn't a lot of content in the guide area, but the owner is working hard to improve this section.


Guild Wars Trade [Free] - Best for crafting a profit. Great news section as well. Already featured on this blog previously.


GW2Spidy [Free] - Best for overall historical statistical data. Loads slowly. Already featured on this blog previously.

I was in a car accident a little while ago. Rear ended while sitting at a stop light waiting for the little red beacon to go dark and the green one to shine true. I'm not sure exactly how fast the person behind me was going, but I believe it was around the speed limit of 35 miles per hour. To sum up the injuries, I am going to a physical therapist now for my back twice per week (after a dozen failed treatments with the chiropractor). There is nothing weirder than putting a medicine ball between your legs and popping your back into place. Gives me a shiver every time lol.

I also have an injury that was probably caused from having a messed up lower back, but I can't prove it. Right after the accident I had to shovel about 300 wheel barrels worth of dirt, as well as chop up a troublesome series of roots in my backyard. By the end of a week I had tennis elbow and a busted shoulder. That landed me an additional two physical therapist visits for week, making a total of four.

So why am I telling you this? Because I have SUCKED at blogging the past month or so. Just flat out sucked. I'm not trying to get sympathy, I'm just trying to reassure you that things will get better as I work to get healthier.

Now, on to the Mystery of the Trending X. To find out what "X" actually is, you'll need to be a forum member and click this link. But you can learn from what I found despite having access or not (hence this post).

A few days ago I started randomly analyzing the "trending up" section of GW2spidy. Low and behold, I found an incredibly interesting pattern for several of the items involved, including the mysterious X. At 12 pm, around every other day, prices drop significantly for certain items. I cannot identify the exact reason, and several forum goers pointed just out how wrong my initial hypothesis was on this phenomenon. Whatever the cause, there is definitely profit to be made from this situation.

Perhaps we should be placing buy orders at 75% of normal values a few hours before this event. Maybe we need to be present during it and buying the lowest listings as they drop down. I'm not sure yet, but I do know that there's far more analysis to be completed with regards to price patterns in Guild Wars 2. Being a global economy, so many different time zones will wreck havoc on any annalist's brain.

I'll keep you posted if I figure anything else out... Cheers!

-Ian

ps. Your website is fantastic. I'm not quite as interested in the details as to what goods you recommend (sorry), but more in your earlier posts regarding the basic principles and theory, i.e. how to look for a market, how to use buying and selling options, and other various tips and tricks in regards to making it on the gw2 economy. I would really enjoy seeing more of your insights in those matters."

You  know, I really do wish this were possible. If you buy 1 gold worth of gems and try to resell them, you will get back approximately 73 gold and change (that's a ~36.XX% fee!). Gems do not go up or down 36% in a single day, so day trading is out of the question.

During the month of December, gems spiked early on and then tricked back down to November rates. See chart below from gw2spidy:

Even if you had bought on December 3rd and sold on Dec 16th, you still would not have made very much money

So can you get into gem investing? Yes, absolutely, but not like any other investments in this game. My suggestion for this market is to use dollar cost averaging. So you spend let's say 1 gold per day on gems, every day, for 6 months. Whenever there is a decent spike in price (like december had), you can sell all of your gems for a profit. Dollar cost averaging helps prevent loss by only allowing you to buy one gold per day, and then you just have to pick a price that is higher than your average buying point when you do sell.

Keep track of how many gems you get per gold spent and you'll have a pretty good idea of when to sell or hang on some more.

"Hi Markco,

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!

I know I've really been holding back on the crafting strategies. Locked tight within the confines of a secret vault, beneath the terrible cliffs of a swiss bank mountain top, lies my entire spreadsheet of profitable crafting strategies. But keeping it all to myself is not going to make you any more gold (which also defeats the entire purpose of this site!). I'm sorry for this and I think that I'm ready to start revealing a handful of my tricks in order to get you to build a collection of your own.

Wool Gloves Padding
Cost to Create: 66 Copper
Sale Price: 1 Silver 45 Copper
Profit: 57 Copper

Wool Gloves Panel
Cost to Create: 64 Copper
Sale Price: 1 Silver 55 Copper
Profit: 68 Copper

The spool of wool thread and other vendor items should always be bought in bulk instead of on the trading post. You would think that goes without saying, but on day one I was buying from the trading post without knowing any better.

So why wool anything? Wool has one of the best profit margins when you convert wool scraps into cloth (compared to other cloth materials). You can save a whopping 25% of the cost on wool cloth if you first take the time to win buy orders on the scraps and turn them into cloth. Be careful though, as sometimes the market shifts and you are better off buying wool cloth instead of scraps all together!

Why do I stop and sell these items instead of continuing to craft? The fact is that most finished crafting items cost less than the embroideries used to create them. This is because people pay a lot of money to level quickly, and thus they value the embroideries more than the finished products.

Keep in mind that I could not successfully flip any of these items based on their buy/sell orders. I HAVE to craft the scraps into cloth and the cloth into paddings or panels in order to turn a profit. This opens up new avenues of making gold in Guild Wars 2 for two reasons:

It takes time and patience.
Not all players have access to tailoring.

Same goes for all other disciplines. Over time, if the population of Guild Wars 2 decreases, then I believe that these crafting materials will also diminish in value. As long as prices remain high, then that reveals there are many people leveling their disciplines and not enough who want to use these items while leveling. I'd prefer this way because it creates a marketplace where most crafters rush through lower levels to get to the "profitable" markets. What they will eventually realize is that level 80 is the LEAST PROFITABLE MARKET IN GUILD WARS 2.

Recently a forum post over on Guild Wars 2 Guru mentioned this blog. The context of the discussion was how to make 2-3 gold quickly with TP only strategies that did not involve speculation.

First off, everything we do on the trading post is speculation. You could make the argument that things like combining scraps into cloth, opening containers, or transforming planks into dowels are not speculation methods, but I would still contend that you really don't know if the market will still favor your choices from moment to moment.

But if we restrict "speculation" to just buying up items that we believe will increase weeks or even months from now, then there certainly are a lot of methods to make your first 2-3 gold.

To start off, you need to understand what to sell that you do pick up while playing the game. Unidentified dyes are something you should always sell without opening. White items often salvage into valuable loot, so only check their value on the trading post before selling your whites to the vendor. During different leveling brackets additional item qualities are introduced. Prior to rares appearing, green weapons and armor are expensive items. But introduce rares and those masterworks become one copper higher than the vendor price.

OK, while leveling those tips should get you to 2-3 gold, but let's say that you just blew all your money away on a shiny new sword. You're level 80 and dreading having to go farm for a few hours. Maybe you're even preparing to buy gems. STOP. Here's a surefire way to make back your gold with a minimal amount of money to start with.

Globs of Ectoplasm. Salvage with a master's salvage kit any rares 68-80 that are worth less than .85x bid price on a weapon or armor. Just place bids (no more than 2 per item) and go farm for a half hour. Come back and you should have a random assortment of items worth salvaging. The average globs of ectoplasm you get back will be about 1 per item salvaged, so you should do a little better than breaking even from that alone. But add in all the random materials and runes/sigils to really maximize your profit. There are some tips to finding the best items to salvage for globs of ectoplasm, but I keep them for forum subscribers only.

Last tip: you really should start reading this blog every chance you get. When I mention a new market to flip or trade in, it tends to explode in value overnight. Look at Sigils of Generosity, which went from 3 silver to 10 gold a piece after I mentioned them.

I've been swamped with work lately. Just to give you an idea, I'm currently working on the following projects besides this blog:

Diablo 3 Gold Blog
So You Think You Can Blog
Super Secret RPG I'm Designing From Scratch (80% Done!!!)
The Traffic Blogger

That's the highest level look at what I'm working on, not including all the details like paid guides, emails, management, etc. Speaking of emails, let's take some of them and answer your questions publicly!

Q1.  Andrew wrote: "Hey Markco. So I've been following your site for about a month and I must say that it has given a much better understanding of the trading post. However, I do have a few questions. I was wondering how to deal with constantly being overcut(?) when trying to buy items. Do you just leave your money there and wait, even if the order prices totally change? Or do you take it down and place a new order? Reversely, what about when I list something and I get undercut by dozens of people and it seems like the item has no hope of being sold? I may just be a impatient but I am extremely scared of losing gold as I do not have much to spend. So any advice on this would be appreciated.
Thanks."

A1. Getting overcut is no where near as detrimental as being undercut. With an overcut, you can either let things play out or withdraw the bid to then rebid or use elsewhere. It's nothing to panic over, and quite often I keep placing larger amounts of buy orders for a single item UNTIL I do see an overcut. That gives me an idea of how much I can play the market before others start interfering. Do not invest all of your gold into the trading post. Play 10% of it at most, so that you aren't so worried about waiting for things to sell. I try to cancel listings after a week of not selling, so you must be willing to let your gold sit. Otherwise you will take a killing over time with the cancellation fees.

Q2. Ben Asked: "Hey there. Been enjoying your Guild Wars Trading Post blog. Learned a lot about flipping. I had a question, didn't see anything on it on your site, but perhaps I missed it.
What's your experience on flipping more expensive items from around 2g and up? Have you noticed a fairly quick turnaround? I'm attempting to flip an item listen for instant buy around 4g and the orders were around 2g40s. I know that playing the GW2 market is most a fairly safe thing to mess around with, but I was wondering what your experience was in doing that.
Thanks again for the tips on the blog and stuff."

A2. My experience is that they take way longer and are therefore not worth entirely focusing on. A few sought after rings and amulets are usually worth it but not all your money.

Q3. Anonymous Wondered: "Hey Man I'm just wondering. U said lvl 80 rares are good right? I see the margin for 1 is around 5~10s but u have to pay like 20s to get supply for 1 while u can do the same with low lvl weapons. Do u think it's worth doin?"

A3. I would much rather you invested in the level 35+ rares and not the level 80 ones. They have the highest competition and are therefore the hardest to succeed with. That being said, boots tend to have the highest profit margins. It has to deal with their vendor price being less than all the other items, as well as some supply and demand rubbish I don't feel like writing a few paragraphs about haha.

Q4.  Raffael Inquired About: "Hello Markco! First of all, let me thank you for your splendid blog. I already learned a lot from reading your articles! One thing that bothers me though is the fact that I have... well... too much money (yeah, you can never have enough but I'll get to the point ;) ). My problem/point is: Flipping works well but I havent found any very valuable items yet i could do it with. Flipping the cheap stuff works great for 20, 30 gold imo. But I got around 200g in my bank and it just takes up too much time/too many things I'd have to find that I can flip to invest a reasonable amount of my money. Most of my money just isn't working for me, sitting in the bank. Do you have any tips how to let more of my gold work without speculating too much? I for one beliefe that mystic coins will go up to 20 or even more silver a piece for several reasons and think it would be worth buying them. But that assumes ANet wont alter the economy (e.g. give more Coins for the monthly because they think Mystic Coins are too expensive) which they have done before. So, speculation is not really my thing because I feel like Anet is just too much of a risk for a longterm investment with a lot of money on the line. Any suggestion how I could invest a bigger amount of money would be very welcome. Thanks again and keep up the good work!"

A4. One simple solution is to increase your volume drastically. Instead of bidding on 30 different items with one buy order each for the purpose of salvaging them, you could put down 30 bids on each of the 30 items. I know it sounds silly, but volume is your best option. You can also throw more gold at mini's and expensive level 80 trinkets. Speculation for future patches, holidays, and currently weak markets should also be a solid 25% of your investments. Finally, you should keep around 25% at all times in case of a massive opportunity. I like the mystic coin speculation, and I too see them increasing in value over time.

HA! And you thought Wintersday items were done selling, didn't you? Actually, Sigils of Generosity are selling like hotcakes, with a nice little profit margin between buying and selling to boot!

At the time of this writing, I was flipping my stockpile of Sigils of Generosity for 3s 97c (originally purchased for 2s 50c). That's a profit of ~87 copper per sale. When you sell a few dozen every hour, it really does add up. Especially when you add a few more strategies to this one.

I just found it interesting that these sell so well, and I'm STILL selling candy corn trinkets from the mad king event (Halloween Holiday).

I think that with the next holiday special event, I will be buying up tons of the hottest seasonal items for the purpose of reselling them. Not necessarily the skins or mini's, but the gear that will show up on searches for even players who aren't looking for them.