For all you billionaire flippers...
By
AgentMountaineer,
Posted on: 2009-07-07 01:47 in The Market and Inventions
speaking of giant markups, i just crafted a Ragnarok I picked up a few weeks back for 55 million and threw it up for the going rate.
Could net my biggest single-item profit ever!
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
Much of the quick sale high profit items that I played in are gone and right now I am in the middle of alt-its and have not been marketing much.
I am sitting on a ton of Lotf-r that I just stole when they crashed and about 20-25 purples, miracles BOZ and other. My intent was to release them into the market slowly as I like to set market prices whenever I can but have not gotten around to it. I figure at this point I will wait until 2XP comes around and the craziness starts to release them.
I was/am not much for flipping recipes, I would look for items that were undervalued buy them up and sell the crafted items at a high dollar amount and was usually making a great return. My items were not set for quick sales but for high profit.
I think my best ever investment was in impervious resistance when I was picking up the recipe for under 500k and was crafting and selling them for up to 25 million before the niche was discovered.
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I think my goal would be to keep my overall rate at >40M/hr or more for time spent. I haven't been marketeering for a few issues, but once I felt out what I could "farm" by 5-boxing (which was about 30M an hour or so, although that was pre-MA, so maybe I could abuse MA more), I felt like marketeering should yield more to be viable. (Although marketeering is "easier" than 5-boxing)
Anyhow, I'd be fine flipping for 200k or 1M profits if I can bid on stacks and sell stacks with little attention and great reliability.
But I found in practice that my best money was made by putting in a ton of lowball bids across many levels of very valuable IOs (miracle, numina, lotg, etc), crafting them, and selling the crafted copies at high rates. (I'd price high enough that my median time to sell was over one week)
This often netted me >40M per purchase, but there were days I'd log in and find I hadn't bought anything and had nothing to flip, so it balanced out times when I might make 3 sales.
Of course, Nethergoat (*wave*) sort of ruined that with his explicit outing of LotGs in particular and the discussion of the profitability of really expensive IOs in general. It's not that you couldn't make a profit, but at least at the time, it shrunk the profit dramatically, and the increased amount of flipping actually LOWERED the high-end price of LotGs because more flippers meant more availability - when I had the ONLY sub-L50 LotG on the market, I could get whatever I wanted, even if that was a new all-time high price.
My last splash was a game mechanics play - when merits were coming out, I decided LotGs and Big IOs would drop in price due to people buying them directly, and that the lack of people getting random rolls would drive prices on modest-demand IOs that were important through the roof. (ie, Celerity: Stealth, Posi: % energy, etc)
When merits rolled I was sitting on over 100 Celerity:Stealths, for example, purchased at 200-500k each. I bought out over 80 L50 ones.
I rolled those all back out to the market for 4-8M each, roughly. So the profit per IO was fairly modest by my standards (3-7M, say), but in the aggregate - it was quite a score. Over a hundred stealths, probably 30+ Posi %Energy, and a handful of others, and I think I netted well over a billion (probably ~1.3-1.5B) for what amounted to perhaps 2-3 hours worth of work... I literally bought them all in less than an hour, mostly just scanning prices of Pool Cs to determine viability, and then buying out anything reasonable. Then I would do quick logins after that, and collect infl and list 5-10 recipes, which took under 10 minutes. Smaller profits than the big flips of yesterday, but hundreds of them done in a short period of time.
I think it's probably very common for salvage flippers to eek out 50-100k profits, but they probably do it with buying and selling 100x+ at a time, and probably place and collect their bids and sales in minutes, so their profits per hour are similar.
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... I've done a bit of craft&resell on a few purples in the past week or so as a way of dipping a toe into ebil-ness.
It's things like this, and the 'Goat's follow up post, that let me know what a rank amateur I really am. I obviously don't spend enough time on ebil.
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And my only point was that it's not an ignorable amount, cutting nearly in half the
profit you claim the first go round. Yeah, fees don't matter as long as you're turning
a profit, and when you've been marketeering a while the calculation is probably automatic,
but it's something to keep track of...
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Once again, the point seems lost on you... So, I'll sum it up in 2 statements and then
you can do/think whatever the heck you want....
1> PROFIT is what you get after costs (which *include* fees) ... If Profit > 0, then
fees DON'T matter... If Profit < 0, You're doing it WRONG.
2> 13.8% of 120M is a LOT MORE than 1000% of 10,111....
Carry On....
4
I've been rich, and I've been poor. Rich is definitely better.
Light is faster than sound - that's why some people look smart until they speak.
For every seller who leaves the market dirty stinkin' rich,
there's a buyer who leaves the market dirty stinkin' IOed. - Obitus.
if something sells for 1000, your fees will be 100, leaving you a total of 900. You'd need to buy at 899 to make ANY profit off of this sale. That would mean you need to list at 1.11x your cost to make profit.
Listing something at a 30% markup would be 1.3x, making profit 1.3 - 1.10 = 0.20 or 20%.
That should clear up the mess of what you need to list at.
I am an ebil markeeter and will steal your moneiz ...correction stole your moneiz. I support keeping the poor down because it is impossible to make moneiz in this game.
I like to make close to double my money, in case I screw up and have to eat a listing fee... or an entire item.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
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I like to make close to double my money, in case I screw up and have to eat a
listing fee... or an entire item.
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I really tend to look at it by price range. To me, and this is all I was really trying to say
with my earlier commentary, range dictates the profit margins I aim for (which evidently
wasn't clear to at least one person). 
Low-Range: 5X-10X cost... To me, 2X is too low here - opportunity/inf is being lost.
Mid-Range: 2X-5X. I'd infer that this is where you usually trade, and I like this range
also... easy to work, low risk, and decent rewards for doing so.
High-Range: 15-30% ... It's Big Money, but there's plenty of competition and mistakes
hurt big time here... That said, if you're sucessful in this range, the inf piles up quickly.
It's doubtful that 120M purple would sell in reasonable time at 240M, so 2X is too much
here...
To me, profit is all about context and price range.
Regards,
4
PS> If you're going to send pvt msgs (you know who you are), at least have the stones
to accept a reply...
I've been rich, and I've been poor. Rich is definitely better.
Light is faster than sound - that's why some people look smart until they speak.
For every seller who leaves the market dirty stinkin' rich,
there's a buyer who leaves the market dirty stinkin' IOed. - Obitus.
Rather than trying to figure what return % you're getting, better to approach it slightly differently.
Let's say you have 100M now and your goal is to reach 1B in 100 days (to keep the numbers easier). That's 900M you need to make in 100 days, or 9M per day. If you have 9 market slots to dedicate to this, then you need to make 1M per slot per day.
At that point it doesn't make any difference if you're making 2X your investment or your profit is 10%. As long as you're making the goal of 1M per slot per day, you're on track.
Trying to maximize profit on each and every transaction will pretty much guarantee that you'll lose your mind in the numbers. 
Sold my Ragnarok for 186 million- dum bid creepers, just go to 200 like I wanted you!
Still....55 mil for the recipe, 2-ish for the salvage, 600k to craft, 10 mil or so in fees, I cleared over 100 million in pure profit.
new personal best!
and r/e %'s and fees:
I'd rather sell something for a 5% profit that made me 10 million inf than something else for a 200% profit that made me 1 million inf.
I'm all about the size of the pile I end up rolling around in. It's much more efficient to deal in high price, low margin stuff than in low price, high margin stuff.
of course, the best is when when you find high price AND high margin... =D
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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Sold my Ragnarok for 186 million- dum bid creepers, just go to 200 like I wanted you!
Still....55 mil for the recipe, 2-ish for the salvage, 600k to craft, 10 mil or so in fees, I cleared over 100 million in pure profit.
new personal best!
and r/e %'s and fees:
I'd rather sell something for a 5% profit that made me 10 million inf than something else for a 200% profit that made me 1 million inf.
I'm all about the size of the pile I end up rolling around in. It's much more efficient to deal in high price, low margin stuff than in low price, high margin stuff.
of course, the best is when when you find high price AND high margin... =D
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Nice!
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I cleared over 100 million in pure profit.
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Impressive.
it was more luck than anything- I was working on a set for the Goat and had three pieces I needed, so I threw out my usual lowball bids and picked one up right away.
Then prices went CRAZY, and I was thinking "huh, i should just flip this thing" and I let it sit while I thought it over. Then yesterday I took a peek at the crafted prices- 200 million? Sign me up!
For that kind of profit I can hold off re-slotting that power for a while.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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IMHO any profit is good profit. I've done everything in this game for inf from muleing recipes to the vendor to flipping purples. Only you can tell what the 'right' balance of time/energy to profit is for your play style.
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Depending on how much time I have I flip ANYTHING.
I actually make alot of my money on salvage.
When something good happens to me, I can never enjoy it....
I am always too busy looking for the inevitable punchline...
BEHOLD THE POWER OF CHEESE!
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Sold my Ragnarok for 186 million- dum bid creepers, just go to 200 like I wanted you!
Still....55 mil for the recipe, 2-ish for the salvage, 600k to craft, 10 mil or so in fees, I cleared over 100 million in pure profit.
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Very nice. My best intentional profit was buying a crafted Miracle +rec for 27M and selling it for 140M the next day (clearly I should have priced it higher). My best unintentional profit was buying a Aegis (I forget which - maybe resistance) for 14M and selling it for 340M. I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be 34M.
RagManX
"if the market were religion Fulmens would be Moses and you'd be L. Ron Hubbard. " --Nethergoat to eryq2
The economy is not broken. The players are
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if something sells for 1000, your fees will be 100, leaving you a total of 900. You'd need to buy at 899 to make ANY profit off of this sale. That would mean you need to list at 1.11x your cost to make profit.
Listing something at a 30% markup would be 1.3x, making profit 1.3 - 1.10 = 0.20 or 20%.
That should clear up the mess of what you need to list at.
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I don't think that is right.
If you have a 30% mark-up, you make profit of 17% (if it sells for exactly what you list at).
e.g. buy something for 100, sell for 130, pay 130 x 10% = 13 in fees, thus
profit = 130 - 100 -13 = 17 inf
My personal minimum mark-up is 20% since it yields a profit of 8% (120% - 100% - 12% = 8%). It has to be a multi-million inf item for me to bother with such a small profit margin.
Off topic, how about them purple recipes, eh? They seemed to have tripled in value in the last few months... many are in the mulitple 100s of millions... there used to only be a very few items that range
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Sold my Ragnarok for 186 million ..... I cleared over 100 million in pure profit.
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Nice little coup there...
Ok... all that stuff I was nattering about regarding context and price ranges...
Ignore It.
100M per transaction...That's the target flip... anything else is just.... phail...
I am not worthy... but I'll aspire to better in the future...
Cheers,
4
I've been rich, and I've been poor. Rich is definitely better.
Light is faster than sound - that's why some people look smart until they speak.
For every seller who leaves the market dirty stinkin' rich,
there's a buyer who leaves the market dirty stinkin' IOed. - Obitus.
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Anything halfway decent in this game with 0 for sale is drastically undervalued.
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QFE, this is a cornerstone of my (lazy) marketing strategy.
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The *point* was the percentage return value gets hit hard on the high-end stuff, but you
got SEVENTEEN fricking Million for ONE slot....
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And my only point was that it's not an ignorable amount, cutting nearly in half the profit you claim the first go round. Yeah, fees don't matter as long as you're turning a profit, and when you've been marketeering a while the calculation is probably automatic, but it's something to keep track of...
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How many of *those* transactions would you like to have, sir???
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I am not a gentleman, and I would not deign to flip uncommon salvage (making me perhaps as snobbish as a gentleman) except maybe on a character starting on a new server. I certainly enjoy the 15 million plus transactions, and am lazily working a couple such niches now.
I do still remember the days when buy-craft-sell that made a 100%-200% profit--1 million per slot!--seemed a big deal. Then I wised up.
Best investment evah (percentage-wise)--picking up a handful of Shield Breaker procs for 1,011,111, one for which the generous soul MrLiberty gave me 30 million.