A Market Journal: From 0 to Millions

Fury, the hardest thing about the market is learning what's "good" to sell, what's a "good" price. Or perhaps hard is the wrong word. Learning what sells quickly for a good margin is the biggest time sink in being successful at the market. Anyone can do it. But it takes time to figure it out.

And frequently, once you figure out one good item, something changes and that once good item becomes much less profitable or even loss producing.

guess for day 6: 1,312,000,000 (1.312B)

As it so happens, I have been inspired by this thread to try a little marketeering redside myself. The method seems sound, and I'm reasonably confident I won't lose money on the exercise, but... let's just say I'm learning the value of a diversified investment portfolio.

Edited to add: I should probably make a guess while I'm at it. I'm not knowledgeable enough to make an educated guess, so I'll just choose a number I like: 1,123,581,321 (or just 1.123B, truncating to the millions).

It's sound....I've been doing this for some time on the wait for big profits plan. Too much living at the market with this method it seems.I prefer to play and swap alts and sometimes don't get back to the market on one for 2-3 weeks.

Just wanted to say, great thread. I've enjoyed following your progress.

775 million <>

The redside market has been good to me since i11 when I made the move over from blueside to redside. I'll give the executive summary of how I made my billions there (though not blow by blow like fury is doing).

I picked something sure which required little upfront infamy as my start point. I bought base salvage for 538 in stacks of 10 and converted it (3 at a time) into component salvage for the minor buffs. Those component salvage usually sold for about 50-100k so while I wasn't getting rich quick it was basically a guaranteed 3-4M everytime I logged in...which was real money back in i11.

Once I had 100M I moved into crafting common IOs as I badged for my personal crafting station. This took about 2 weeks and I made about 80M extra doing it.

From there I started buying the recipes I wanted along with 4 extras of each which I listed for exactly 10% more than my costs. In theory I should "break even" on these but in the 3 weeks it took me to slot my brute out I actually made about 600M. The niches I found to be profitable I set an alt on crafting in stacks of 5 (for purples) or 10 (everything else).

At this point I began to use my brute to farm to pop recipes so I wasn't just a crafting ebil'er. At first this was dwarfed by my already substantial market operations which were bringing in 300M a week in i12 (which was alot more money back then). But once AE came out the purples I was popping soon became my main source of income since everyone else wasn't popping them anymore.

During the height of AE I was popping about 5 purples a week and selling them for an verage of 150M each (750M a week).....plus my market operations were now bringing in about 500M a week using only 4 alts (total time commited about 3 hrs a week).

I slotted all my 50's in purples and PvP IOs even though they were quite expensive which in retrospect was a marketeering mistake but from a fun standpoint well worth it.

I made another huge pile while the AE MM bug was active and purples spiked to 750M each. In retrospect I should have dumped my whole stock and even respec'ed some inactive alts while that was on...but that wouldn't have been fun. Its a game not a marketeering contest.

Flexibility and patience have been the key redside. Sometimes your niche collapses or you have a competitor arrive. For sure I have driven people off a few niches cause they were too good to give up (to the benefit of the people buying them at the time), but usually I just capitulate the niche to the other person while dumping my stock right below their listing price.

In 6 issues since I moved redside I've made close to 170B total and spent much of it. There really isn't anything wrong with making inf on the red market.....moreso the problem is getting stock that you want back out of it for the inf you have. My problem at the moment is that I have more inf that I know how to spend and if I was to recklessly try to spend even 20% of it I'd cause the redside market to suffer major inflation. So I'm very happy the merger is coming honestly.

I suspect the new market will feel more like the current hero one than the current villian one....but I'll adapt and be happy I can actually spend as well as earn.


P.S. If I win the guessing contest I am going to donate all winnings in significant chunks to random new players who log into mercy island on freedom with no vet badges (so I can at least think they're noobs which every game needs to keep alive).

Been watching this since the start.

Gonna drop in and guess 940 mil.

This thread is great! Lots of great ideas.

My guess, 992 mil.

913 million.

Day 6 - Staring inf: 626,004,416, Ending inf: 700,874,176

A slower than expected day in terms of earnings - only a 75M profit day. While only three IOs sold during the day, a late evening rally saw the sale of five more IOs. The Doctored Wounds End/Rech sales have been unexpected since I picked up a stack of them for 155k each, and they wound up selling for 9 and 10M. I'm sure I've blown that niche for someone just now, but oh well.

From a ticket generation perspective, I've had limited time and started and stopped playing probably five or six different arcs. It's been a day of interruptions, so all told I generated around 240 tickets, spent them promptly on 35-39 bronze rolls and got nothing worthwhile. That doesn't mean that you'll always get bad luck. I've had rolls where I ended up with two Regen Tissue uniques, two Steadfast Res/Defs, Basilik's and a bunch of other sellables in a small number of rolls. However, the rolls haven't been kind to me the last couple of days. Still even with that, because I've gone back to bidding on recipes to build up my sellable stock, I've still been able to generate consistent profits.

It's nice to make the 700M mark at the end of day 6. Friday is the beginning of the weekend cycle and sales will pick up. I expect sales to be brisk. There's an outside chance that I may hit the billion mark (I've had 500M Fridays before), but also factor in the fact that I'll be working a very long day tomorrow and play time will be limited again. The best guesses will probably be in the 750-850ish range. Good luck!

The late evening rally:

Oh by the way, I'm taking day 7 guesses from this point on. This will be last guess allowed per player. I'll tabulate profits on Friday and depending on how much energy I have left after work either post the winning total on Friday (or Sat morning at the latest).

My last guess is going to be 860m

Fourth and final guess:

901,234,567.

Thanks for the market lesson, Fury! It's been fun to watch!

Hmmm.... well may well give it a shot.
782,964,332 <- Mah guess
Anyway great thread it was a fun read.

Last guess - 797 million.

809,000,908 . Goooo team!

I think the greatest appeal of this thread is that this has not been done with a min/maxed character, but seems to fit more into the mold of what one would call a casual player in that you have limited time to play, but are still raking in influence by the millions just in one week. it would be awesome to see you hit the billion mark by the end of the week, but even if you don't, I think the point has been well demonstrated that it doesn't take maximum time to earn awesome rewards in this game

Thanks for the thread! It has been fun to watch.