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!

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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.

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