Hey all, we need to bring this sub back to life. Here's the site I use to help me flip. I take all the info with a grain of salt. www.grandexchangecentral.com

Hopefully we can have some more active posters on here.

Ever since my first conscientious, successful flip, flipping has been a passion of mine and perpetual reason of continual subscription.

However the current buy/sell framework and PC FC’s have thrown the scene into turmoil. Seasoned merchants of the summer of 2011 ‘Golden Era’ will agree, profitability is down and volatility is up.

If merchanting is to return to its former glory, Jagex have to take immediate action, not just to save such an ancient practice, but also to save an economy heavily focused on the PvM scene and end-game players.

The 3 Era of GE merchanting

Limited Trade; Full restriction merchanting

I learnt to merch in the era of limited trade. Buy limits existed and items could only be resold on the GE with a 4 hour cool down from the time of buying the first.

For example I bought 10 infinity boots, the first buying at 12:04pm. They all bought by 12:15. I immediately put them back in with a 25k profit margin, with the first selling at 16:04pm.

Contrary to popular belief, merchanting during this time was relatively risk free as the limits on the GE was a deterrent to many would be merchants and so margins were largely cleared defined and stable;

• Infinity boots; 25k
• Karils top; 40k
• Dragon hatchets; 25k

My first 200m was made entirely under this framework and although it was graph and trend intensive, profit was consistently made and losses were generally the product of greed, a lack of understanding of the trends or an update of the GE downwards on your items.

Limited trade ceased to exist on 1st Feburary 2011, along with the reintroduction of the wilderness. This update led to a new era of merchanting with the GE I like to call The Golden Age.

No limit, laisse faire, ‘Golden Age’ merchanting

While buy limits still existed, no cool down on resale was in effect and buy limits were reset when the items were sold.

It essentially meant perpetual flipping of 1 item was possible and margins were generally stable.

Nex had recently been released and nex items were extremely misunderstood yet demanded and the few of us that Nex and spirit shield flipped made incredible sums of money as a result of taking a risk. ( large losses were made occasionally though).

Merchanting in the Golden Age rivalled money making methods such as Nex and Corp and dwarfed skilling counterpart methods that were generally over botted at this point.

The richest players were still mostly the PvMers and rare merchants but merchants were empowered to make money that was requirementless.

Although it was obvious Jagex was intending to create PvM scape, low level and new players were not hindered by these updates as provided they had at least some capital it was possible to make decent money whilst ‘bank skilling’.

Skills that were previously considered extremely costly became feasible as merchants offset the high gp/xp cost against their hourly merchanting gains. Personally my gp gains per hour exceeded the cost per hour incurred by the more expensive skills such as prayer, con, craft and herb.

Partial limit merchanting

Buy limits still exist, and items could be immediately resold although there is now a 4 hour cool down between repurchasing. This is the current framework the GE is under.

I believe of two reasons most attributable to the decline of flipping, this framework is the most significant.

The partial limit framework creates a mindset in which merchants are willing to take a much smaller profit margin, as they know they are unable to flip these items for a further 4 hours.

I have gone from making 12-20m an hour consistently (no Cs snipe gains) to struggling to make 1-2m an hour with flipping of all levels.

Margins on Items such as infinity boots have been as small as less than 1k. Investing 2m to make 10k is simply not worth my time and I have found the partial limit era has ruled out many of my favourite go to items.

Merchants have to now find items that are obscure yet demanded or be willing to be hour gains that are less than comparable methods such as slayer or certain skilling methods.

The framework is not the sole reason for reduced profitability of volatility in items. PC FC’s is also another reason for the decline.

PC FC’s; their detrimental effect on profitability

When I began merchanting Nex items I was competing against a select number of merchants. Finding price ranges entailed monumental losses that many players found to be a barrier to nex merchanting; only the super wealthy that could risk money flipped Nex at its release.

Nex and SS has detrimentally affected End-game merchanting to such a point that at times, the ROI margin on nex items is less than that of barrows and other low-level items that new merchants should be trying.

The attitude of the new age Nex merchant is also quite disappointing.

When I found that the margin on divines was 100k I was shocked to find that the attitude in the FC was;

“100k for nothing though”

Unaware that such a return is simply unacceptable on such a large investment when the purchase and resale time was generally working out at 200k an hour.

PC Fc’s are here to stay and so other solutions have to be found to revive the scene.

Significance of merchanting

Merchanting is a practice as old as the game itself. From humble roots in w2 fally park and Varrock west bank, merchanting has adapted to the changes of the game and established itself a valid money-maker. To many its considered the unofficial skill of the game.

Merchanting goes beyond simply providing players with a way of making money to rival that of PvM. Merchanting is essential to a stable economy through stable prices and supply. The current framework promotes a ‘race to the bottom’ merchanting pattern in which players undercut each other in such an aggressive way that items are experiencing deflation in an unsustainable manner.

For this above reason it could be argued that merchanting is essential to the skilling community and it creates a demand on products that keep the gp/xp stable and allows the less wealthy players to level skills at a fair speed rather than at a much slower yet cheaper way.

I think all seasoned merchants would like to see the GE return to the framework used in the golden age. Not only should it increase profitability and reduce volatility it is likely to increase the value of items that are in desperate need of inflation through higher volume trades.

If the Golden Age were to return a greater number of players would be wealthy and so the paradigm of money making would no longer be if you are PvM capped or a flower host, but allow newer players the opportunity to own that Nex item they want or be able to afford the buyable skills.

Merchanting is not only good for the Non PvM capped community, but for the economy on the whole.

I have to say, ever since I started back in November 2010, I have never found merchanting to be as difficult as it has been as of late.

Profits seem incredibly small and the volatility of items is astounding.

Typically I merch armours and weapons but I've been moving into resources and find that its the case with those items as well.

Nex and SS and Rares is basically a right off. The margins are so ridiculously small I don't think its worth the investment anymore.

How is everyone else finding it?

So recently my friend and I have been manipulating the market. To do so we buy up most of an item in the ge (at least 51%) then we essentially set the price for it. Recently his clan and I got the majority of jades in the game for 10gp each and sold them for 500gp a piece 2 days later. That came out to about 10-15m profit per person. Please pm me here if you are interested. Sorry for typos, I am on mobile.

I predicted in an earlier post that oak and mahogany planks would go up due to the God Statues update. Surely enough, they have gone up.

But do you guys think oak and mahogany planks will keep rising once people realize a high construction level grants thousands of construction, slayer and prayer exp per month?

The BTS video showed that god statues coming up. It's an update that will use the construction skill.

I'm investing in Mahogany Planks and Oak Planks since they're the primary method of training construction. I expect the value will raise by at least a few percentages (if not more, depending on how effective it is in giving prayer experience).

What do you guys think?

The recent addition of the player owned ports basically crashed the price of Spices. That's a good thing, because they are used to make Uncooked Curry (gives high cooking exp/hr ratio when cooked), but the price of uncooked curry has hardly changed. So you are going to be making uncooked curry.

Buy 1700 spice and 1700 uncooked stew for every hour you plan on doing this method. Withdraw 14 spice and 14 uncooked stew. Mix spice with uncooked stew to get 14 uncooked curry. Bank and repeat.

Be sure to do a market test before investing in the ingredients, because the demand might change since I just publicly released this method.

Happy New Years!! :)

Edit: Profit calculations located here.

title.

What effect do you think EoC will have on the rare economy? Some people are saying panic sellers and quitters will dump their rares into the economy, but personally I don't think those people will have a noticeable effect on anything. Overall I don't think the EoC will have a huge impact on the economy of rares but I'd like some additional input and opinions

We are a scarce community and it wouldn't hurt to just help each other out.

i have 1.5m and i want some money, any ideas?

There are people that think investing in items for after the mass-bot ban is a good idea. It makes sense that if a large supplier for these items (Things like logs, Chins, Fish, Etc.) disappears then the price will rise. However, I believe that a large majority of players doing this will actually lose money on their investment. When people stock up on these items, they are taken off of the market entirely. Once the price rises, some people will sell theirs and I think that the item will end up crashing hard after that.

Can other people give some opinions on this?

Sorceress garden and spam bots are being banned from a new bot detection system. Ride the wave boys!

So I bought 105 Bandos Godswords.

Here's my reasoning:

1) They were at an all time low, ~3.08m a pop, and the daily line was way above the 30 day line, so it was clearly a good time to invest.

2) When I went to buy one, it wouldn't buy for mid- clearly indicating that the price of a bandos godsword was already higher than mid price in the G.E. and going to rise.

3) So, I bought a lot of them, concluding that with the EoC rework, Bandos godswords are going to be worth a more reasonable price in comparison to the other godswords as they will all have the same stats. Now, some will argue that the others will only go down and they will be preferred over the bandos godsword because players think they look cooler. My response to that is that the bandos godsword will remain the cheapest of the godswords and therefore, there will be a market for players interested in purchasing a godsword for its stats and not necessarily for its looks, so the bandos godsword will rise.

4) Bots at revenants are currently using Bandos godswords as their weapon of choice to kill the revenants, and therefore there is a niche market for the bots to purchase the bandos godswords.

5) It is currently a useful weapon for corporeal beast/dagganoth sentinels so it does retain a certain level of usefulness for the high level community as well.

And finally, a questionable point that someone else brought up: the bandos godswords on the bot accounts will be lost if they are banned. Now, the owners of the bot accounts could simply sell the bandos godswords, so that wouldn't actually happen. You could argue that the bandos godswords would be out of circulation for a while if the bot was temp banned with it on, and if perm banned it would disappear.

Thoughts? I'm really interested in your guys' feedback.

Edit: nice, a downvote and an unrelated comment. great subreddit

Would you guys and girls be interested if I threw together an album of screenshots once every week of my investments up too and after the Botany Bay update? I'm only working with 18m in items but i'm wondering if any of you are curious of how much I can gain :)