Runescape Merchanting Guide 2010

I think one thing which becomes obvious to any experience Runescape Merchanter, is how the market changes, and how different items become good or bad to merchant as time goes on.  This is why I’ve written a brief but accurate 2010 Runescape Merchanting Guide which will provide you with up to date information about what to merchant, what’s changed and so on.

One great thing to do if you’ve got around 3-10 million gp sitting about is set merchanting, and although it was more effective when the Grand Exchange was released you can still make around 5-6 million gp in a few hours merchanting while training other activities and just checking and updating your offers from time to time.  Item set merchanting is when you buy a set of armor, un-package it into its separate pieces and then sell them individually for a profit.  The great thing about doing this is that the four hour rule does not apply to these items.  The four hour rule means that once you buy an item on the Grand Exchange you have to wait four hours before selling it.  But since you’re buying technically an armor set which is an item itself, and then un wrapping it to its composite items you effectively get around the rule.

The best sets to merchant are the Barrows Brother’s sets; I’d say that Ahrim’s, Karil’s and Guthan’s are the best sets to merchant at the moment.  The trick is to look at their GE price graphs and see which ones are staying relatively stable.  If they’ve gone up or down by several 100k gold they’re not stable, but if they’ve gone up or down by 50k and below then they will be fine.  Put in one offer for the set you wish to choose, let’s say Guthan’s, add the price for around 5,000 gp over its medium value and then wait.  If you get the item straight away you know you could have bought it at a reduced price, lower your price by 50k and put in the same offer again.  If it sells quickly then repeat until you reach a point where you can buy it after around 5-20 minutes.  If it takes just a few seconds then you could have bought it cheaper.  If it doesn’t buy at slightly above its medium price then do the opposite thing and raise the price gradually until you can buy them all.

Once you have ten sets of Guthan’s it’s time to break them into their individual item pieces, you can do that at the GE also.  Once you’ve done this, bank everything and remove them all as noted items so you should have ten Guthan’s war spears, tops, skirts and helmets.  If you saved money on each set by buying them for under their average price – let’s say 125k, then sell them at slightly below average price for each item.  So if you’re talking forty items, and you reduce their value by 2001gp each it means you’re going to lose 80k for all the items you sell – but since you make a saving of 1.25million gold it means you’re making over a million gold.

If you had to buy the item for 200k above the medium price, and you shouldn’t have because frankly that’s too high I wouldn’t go higher than around 150k it’s time to sell the items.  Do the exact same thing but in reverse.  I brief warning I’m going to give is that it’s much easier to make money buying the item sets for a lot below their market value and selling them for slightly below their market value instead of the opposite.  This is because people tend to buy items at, at least medium price, people won’t often go 20-50k under an item to buy it, and they’ll usually try and buy it a few thousand gold over and not under.  This means you’re going to be much more successful merchanting item sets which are going down as opposed to ones which are rising!

Interested in learning more? Visit Runescape Merchanting Guide 2010 Now!

Runescape Merchanting Dos and Don'ts

When you look at a topic such as merchanting there are definitely a certain amount of Runescape Dos and Don’ts to apply.  There are some areas of the game as well as life where there are no definitive rules, but with regards to Merchanting there are definitely a few things you should be sticking to and doing in order to maximize your profits and minimize your losses.

I think one important merchanting tip is to make sure you don’t invest all of your money at once I’d definitely recommend investing only around 20-25% of your entire capital at any one time.  Remember, even if you’re experienced at merchanting and you’re winning around 70% of your trades that still means that you’re going to lose three out of ten.  There’s no reason why you can’t lose three in a row and although it’s unlucky it’s far from impossible.  So if you lose half your investment three times in a row you could go from 100 million gp to 50 to 25 million even if you’re doing everything right.  Even if you were to win the next few after you’d just be back up to where you were originally.  Losing consecutively doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong at all, but as with many things on Runescape and in the real world luck plays a part and if you get unlucky and lose there’s nothing saying you can’t get unlucky and lose several times in a row – have you ever rolled three double numbers playing Monopoly?  They’re unlikely but it happens.

A very important ‘do’ in Runescape Merching is to make sure that you read the Runescape homepage every single day if not several times a day.  Runescape updates are released at quite random intervals and to be honest you can’t really predict when they’ll be coming out.  What you can predict is that there will be changes to items, quests, mini games and so forth and these could all directly and indirectly affect item prices.  Imagine if they changed the special attack on Dragon claws to use 55% instead of only 50%.  This would mean that people couldn’t consecutively special attack twice in a row, and since it’s a popular pking weapon people would go for alternatives and hence its value could drop dramatically in value.  There almost certainly wouldn’t be a large single page dedicated to this, and there are usually very minor updates which have minor changes at the bottom.  But whereas Jagex may see altering this or that as a minor change to people who have potentially millions, if not hundreds of millions of gold invested it means that their entire banks or a lot of their money is at stake.  Even if it’s just a regular pker or the owner of a particular item, they could be losing a lot of money and by quickly glancing through every single update and specifically reading the bottom of the page it can protect you from the worst of these changes.

Want to learn more?  Visit Runescape Merchanting Dos and Don'ts Now!

Merchanting Logs on the Grand Exchange

Using merchanting logs while merchanting on the Grand Exchange are a great way to improve your skills and abilities as a merchanter.  Merchanting logs are essentially a sort of diary of when you bought what item, for how much and how many - as well as when you sold and if you were in profit or loss.  Whenever you make an entry I'd definitely consider writing down as well where you went wrong and what you could do to improve next time. Sometimes even if I've made money I'll write down where I went wrong, because sometimes I'll take a risk I know I shouldn't and it'll luckily pay of - but this doesn't mean that that I did was right, what I did was stupid and I got lucky and it's as simple as that.

Using this type of diary is a great way to help you improve in what you do because you can look back over what you've done and slowly but surely lower the amounts of errors your make.  The common merchanting error a lot of people make isn't in picking the wrong item, most people are quite good at picking the right item but they're bad at knowing when to sell.  It's far better to make lots of small to moderate gains then to lose constantly and only get a few big wins.  When you've made a tidy profit then get out and keep it, eventually whatever it is you've bought into will drop and the longer you hold onto it the greater the chance of it dropping in value.  I'd definitely say as a rule that if you're making 5-15% you should definitely sell the item, if you wait for it to crash not only will you not make any money but there's a massive chance you'll actually lose it.

What's more important is that lots of small victories are far better than a few big ones.  Constantly making the right decisions will clear your mind for the trades to come and it'll give you a much better mind set.  What you definitely don't want is to be sitting at the edge of your seat completely nervous because you know you're probably going to lose money!

Merchanting Logs on the Grand Exchange help you achieve all these things and more, check them out!

Merchant Clans on Runescape

One group of clan that have risen with the introduction of the Grand Exchange are called Merchant Clans.  These are clans which in theory merchant items together for the benefit of everyone.  The reality is far from the truth because most of these clans exist purely to serve the leaders and the players who set the items to merchant.

In theory what should happen is that the clan leaders pick an item and tell everyone to buy this item at the same time for a higher value than what it's actually worth.  Other players in Runescape can't buy this item for its regular price so buy it for its higher price pushing up the value further.  Once the item has risen in value the clans leaders should then tell everyone to sell at the same time ensuring that everyone receives an equal and relative profit.  In reality of course this doesn't happen and most people lose money.  What happens is that the clan leaders buy the item days before everyone stocking up with large amounts.  They tell everyone to buy after they've already bought a lot, and they then sell it before telling everyone else to sell it.  This ensures they make a profit, and all but ensures that everyone else not told what item to buy actually lose money.  It's similar in a sense to a quasi Runescape ponzi scheme where only the first few layers of people at the top make money, and everyone else serves to make them money not themselves money which is obviously how it should be.

If you are interested in making money from Merchanting there are a few tips I can give you that'll definitely help you out.  First tip, find a merchanting partner!  One big problem is that it's hard to buy and sell items quickly for profit because when you buy an item you're never quite sure if you could've bought it cheaper unless you're willing to wait for 30 minutes or so each time you attempt to buy it.  With a friend he can tell you prices to buy and sell for for different items, and you can do the same for him.  It seriously makes things much easier.

One thing's for sure, merchant clans on Runescape are not good for money unless you're at the very top scamming everyone else!

Good Merchanting Items On Runescape

Merchanting it no easy thing to achieve, and it's as tough as the slayer skill to master, but knowing what to merchant on the Grand Exchange - as well as knowing a few tips and tricks can save you a lot of stress, and make you a lot of gp.

When identifying what type of item to merchant, it essentially needs to be an item which you can invest at least a few million gold in - but preferably closer to 20million and up.  This may be a few abyssal whips, or it may be a few hundred of thousand ranarr seeds.  As long as you can buy them with 2-3 four hour slots then they're good enough to merchant.  This being as long as you can invest a decent amount of money into them in the allotted time.  If you look at rune platebody's for example they're around 70k but you can only buy 10 per 4 hours, so in 12 hours you could only buy 30 for a total of 2.1million gp's worth of gold.  But making 5-10% profit on that which I'd say is realistic if you judged things correctly, would mean you only gain 105k-210k at the very most.  It's very possible that you don't make any money at all and that you lose some because the market has shifted within the time frame.

Finding Good Merchanting Items On Runescape isn't easy, but if you read around this blog you'll gain more and more information, tips and hints that mean instead of losing a little money on average you'll start to gain it.  But my advice more importantly isn't just to read up and down all about the topic, it's about trying it out for yourself. Start on a small scale, and get a feel for the market, sometimes it's best to target just one item because you get better and better at predicting what'll happen and so when's the best time to buy and the best time to sell as well.

Get Rich Runescape!

People ask me a lot of questions, but it seems a reoccurring theme I get asked is how to get rich on Runescape.  It's a question that I'd love to answer, but like all difficult questions there is no simple or easy answer - you can only really give very non-specific responses.  Imagine being asked, how do you get rich... in the real world?  What could you answer?  You could respond by telling the person to start up their own business, or study a worthwhile university degree and get a good job afterwards, but the person is essentially wanting everything done easy for them.  They full well know that people get rich from businesses or as dentists with multiple practices.  So they shouldn't be asking where riches are, they should be asking what it takes to get there, to be that multimillionaire businessman.

Getting a lot of gold on Runescape is no different than anything in the real world, the vast majority of players know that you need to either be a very high level and kill other high level monsters or go to the God Wars Dungeon, or that you could merchant your way to success like many have done.  The difference between these players and the vast majority of poor players, is that they didn't just know the information and wait around - they acted on it.  They weren't waiting for some special secret that would make them billions overnight because it doesn't exist.  They found out what they had to do, and did it - and that makes them different from 99% of people.  Everyone knows how to lose weight don't we?  It's simply a matter of having an energy deficit, but knowing this doesn't make it easy, the knowledge behind it is in fact the simple part - the implementation is what's holding people back.

So before you walk around asking people how to make millions of gp, just remember, you know the answer so stop looking for a quick fix and achieve your goals and get rich Runescape!

Best Items to Merchant On The Grand Exchange

This post may seem similar to the previous one asking what the best items to merchant on Runescape were, but it's subtly different, because the post is geared more towards the re arrival of free trade, whereas this is with regards to merchanting on the Grand Exchange since it's inception as well as the removal of free trade and the wilderness.

This may be surprising to hear, but I've often found the best items to merchant on the Grand Exchange are in fact the ones that get merchanted the most by merchanting clans.  This means that if you were to look at their GE graphs on the front page the lines indicating their average price would vary a lot meaning instead of being horizontal based it's vertical based with a lot of drops and rises.  This may not seem like a good idea, because unless you're in a clan you have no idea whether it's going to go up and down.  The trick however, is to find an item which is massed merchanted a lot, such as abyssal whips, dark bows and so fourth.  This type of item will be rising and lowering in price constantly, so if you buy it when the prices are averagely low then you'll only have to wait a few days maybe a week to ten days before a clans decides to merchant it again.  At this point, if you have lets say 100 dark bows already bought it means you don't have to buy them at max price which means you're saving a day or two's worth of price rising.  If you have 100 of this item at (for simplicity) 1million gp which has a lower limit of 900k and a higher value of 1.1million, then as soon as a clan starts buying it out you're already making 100k x 100 items which is 10 million right away.  After that it's almost guaranteed to rise for several days, and it wouldn't be unreasonable at all for the middle price to rise to 1.2 million with an upward boundary of 1.35million after two days.  At this point it's still very likely to be bought out, and hence would be a good time to sell for the maximum amount.  You can make around 100 items x 350k which equals a profit of 35 million gold after just a few short days!

This type of item merchanting is good because it relies on the power of grand exchange clans, without relying on their biased selling dates.  It also means you are in a position of power, similar to that of the clan leaders because you can buy the items at the middle price just as they do.  Seeing as you're buying it earlier you can definitely sell it much earlier and still take a good amount of profit.  The longer you leave it, the greater the chance of losing everything, it's best to have lots of smaller consistent gains as opposed to fewer and larger ones.

The best items for this type of merchanting method are:

1.  Dark Bows
2.  Abyysal Whips
3.  Dharok's Armour Sets - or individual parts
4.  Torag's Armour Sets - or individual parts
5.  Karil's Armour Sets - or individual parts
6.  Rares - such as Halloween masks, Partyhats and Santa hats
7.  Bandos items
8.  Armadyl items
9.  All godswords

For more details on Runescape Merchanting, you can visit Runescape Merchanting Guide for more details and information, tips and tricks!

What Are The Best Items for Merchanting on Runescape

It's a question I get asked a lot, people coming up to me and asking what the best items for merchanting on Runescape are.  Now this isn't an easy question to answer, but to start with I think it'd be best to tell you what's not good for merchanting.  To start with, as obvious as it seems, items that are stable in value aren't worth your time at all.  If an item isn't going up or down by more than a few percent every 30 days then it's simply not worth your time.

Volatile items are a quite good choice to pick to merchant because they go both up and down a lot without necessarily following a trend.  There are some items, for example dark bows which get bought out and dumped a lot by merchanting clans.  The trick isn't to be in one of these clans, it's to buy the item and wait for it to be bought out before you sell it.  The hard part is knowing when to sell, and unless you know inside information you can only guess.  The problem of course with this is guessing is going to lead to errors, so minimising mistakes maximises profits.  Waiting one to three days before selling your item is the best option.  An important thing to remember is that if you sell the item while it's still going up you'll be able to sell it for the maximum amount on the grand exchange boundary.  This means that essentially the 'middle' figure isn't an accurate amount to sell for, if you wait three days you tend to make five days with of profit in reality.

As a general rule of thumb, perishables that are used up constantly such as foods and potions are the best for merchanting.  Armours and some weapons are also really good too, specifically barrows items and 3rd age items are very good.  Weapons such as the abyssal whip, dark bows, godsword and so forth are also very good for merchanting.

If an item crashes before you get chance to sell it then you almost certainly have only yourself to blame unless you're quite unlucky.  The trick is to not get too greedy.  Remember, if you buy 10 abyssal whips for 3m and the medium price raises after two days to 3.2m there's no reason why you can't sell them for 3.4m which means a 4 million gp profit.  However, if you wait too long you might end up selling them for below what you started!

Going on trends is usually a pretty good method of making money, it's very simple.  All you do is look at the graph and see which way the item is going over the 180days period.  There's a reason for this rise or collapse in price, you may not know it, but if it's going consistantly up or down for half a year there'll be a reason why. Merchanting clans tend to only be able to corrupt the prices of items for a few days, a week or two at the most - for a long time rise or drop there has to be a reason.

Merchanting Clan Scam

With the advent of the Grand Exchange merchanting on Runescape has totally changed for however.  Merchanting used to be a very simple process but nowadays and for the last two years we've seen a lot of merchanting clan scam organisations.  Merchanting used to be a very simple process on Runescape, and essentially there were two main methods of merchanting.  You'd know the price of a specific item or set of items and then buy it for slightly lower than what you knew its market value to be.  For this you'd buy it of people desperate to sell or people unsure of the price or maybe both.  From here you could simply raise the price to market value or above market value and simply wait for people to buy it.

Lets look at some old prices for an item such as a Karil's leathertop which was 150k in mid 2007, imagine buying 100 for 125k and selling them for 175k - that's 5 million gp profit.  Take more expensive items such as whips, which were worth around 3 million gp back then.  Imagine buying 100 for 2.9 million and selling them for 3.1 million gold - that's a 200k profit on 100 units which is 20 million gold profit!

The second type of merchanting back in the 'olden' days of Runescape involved not buying up items for slightly under the average price and selling them, but was in fact buying items and waiting for them to increase (or decrease if you were unlucky).  If you had noticed the prices of some items had been going up for awhile then you could invest in them and buy 100s or 1000s of that particular item.  Just as before, if you had 100 units of an item that went up by a million gold you'd have a 100 million gp profit!  These are very old methods of merchanting which with the introduction of the Grand Exchange as well as the caps on trading and pricing means that they're now invalid.  However seeing as their was the wilderness referendum I think that definitely in the foreseeable furture there's a very good chance of free trade and the wilderness returning - which means a resurfacing of these old merchanting techniques.

But this post isn't to do with old Runescape money making methods, they're to do with the prevalent merchanting scams which are fantastic for making money if you're at the top of the pyramid - but terrible if you're not.

They usually involve a number of leaders - anywhere from 1-20 which buy up a certain item - lets say a dark bow.  They then usually have several clan chats full of people hoping to get rich quick from merchanting.  These people are told that they'll all collectively buy the item at the same time, and when it rises they'll all sell it and make a profit.  In reality if this were to happen then the market would soon be over saturated and so it wouldn't work anyway because the prices would crash.  But seeing as this is essentially a Runescape ponzi scheme the natural crash doesn't happen right away.

The elite and usually very rich members buy out hundreds of dark bows each for market value, then instruct their followers to then buy the items up.  They'll tell the followers when to drop the item, but instead of dropping it at the same time with them, will sell it a day or two after the followers have been pushing up the price even more.  Eventually when the suckers who are still buying dark bows start getting them for minimum price they realize the item is crashing in value and try to sell theirs too.  This all means that unless you sold very early you're bound to lose money.  The people who make money are directly making it of their merchanting clan who tend to put a lot of their own money into an idea which is almost definitely going to fail.

I'd definitely steer clear of merchanting clans!  Unless you're at the top that is, in which case you'll be really raking in the gold!