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.