Tips and Tricks from a newby: A market blog.

Is it just me or has the market tightened up a little in the last week or two? I'm not doing too horrible, up to about 250m from 100, but my first market character is basically locked up with things that the bottom has dropped out of but I'm too cheap to relist... no worries, lots of alts and patience.

Also, re: HVMs: Yes. I financed my elec/shield (separately, not through my market characters) by trading merits for, and selling, two Miracle uniques. Frankly I'm amazed the prices for them are still as high as they are.

Yeah, I've noticed less 'give' in the market. However, every time I go looking, I find another three or five enhancements that I can craft for 5M and sell for 20M. I'm starting to think that setting my minimum at "10M per slot" is too low.

So, tried to teach myself Flipping again. I got it figured out, but I just don't like doing it. Strikes me as kinda mean. Nothing against flippers, because I'm basically doing the same thing by buying recipes and selling the enhancements, it is just not for me.

I haven't noticed any difference at all, but that's probably because I've just been clearing out all the junk I laid away in my bases and not poking around for new niches. My guesses were pretty good, and even the melee IO sets I was worried about have finally rebounded a bit.

I haven't touched purples yet. I've never been able to find a margin I liked. I'm able to make as much RoI with yellows and oranges with less tied up in each item.

I stick to min-max levels. That is, max for most IOs, minimum for procs and uniques, and 35 for frankenslotters.

I was messing around with salvage to learn the flipping game without investing a lot of money. I then made about 100M working with an in-demand enhancement, and didn't really enjoy it the way I do hunting down recipes and crafting those for sale.

I have been incredibly lax the past week, casually flipping masses of salvage at-cost for the purposes of building up to Power Seller. I'm down to 1.5b or thereabouts. Time to start making some real money again. I'll be updating the OP with any new insights I have as I shoot for a loftier goal: 10b. I'm going to forgo posting full transaction logs, as there will likely be more movement than anyone really wants to read about. I will post niche and profits on a daily or bi-daily basis.

As a fellow noob marketeer, I get pretty jazzed now by these threads. I started dabbling in the market in late July/Aug, but got derailed by work and GR. I got back into it on 9/18 with my own experiment to see how much I could make just from buying/selling on the market, with no other sources of income (though my toon did start with 60M). I haven't taken any screenies, but am keeping a log on an Excel spreadsheet, which is a pain to do, but useful as a reference tool.

I don't have my sheet with me, but iirc, as of 9/22, I made about 468M in total profit. I am shooting for my first 1B profit by month end. Not sure how that's going to go… I started pretty strong out of the gate (it was a weekend), but my sales slowed down quite a bit so far this week. Here's hoping for another busy weekend.

Just as seebs said. Friday is the only day of the week that I will intentionally make time in my schedule for marketing, to make sure I've as many slots filled with profitable listings as possible.

Roughly 36 hours after jumping back in, I've invested just about 100% of my billion and a half, gotten about 500 million in returns, and have about 2 billion worth of assets that I expect to move over the weekend. All from ten minutes of "work" on two characters, buying cheap recipes and salvage overnight then listing expensive enhancements. If that doesn't count as free money, nothing does.

Heh, my big profit from the evening came from getting my hands on a stack of Luck of the Gambler unique recipes for less than 100 million a piece. No big secret, just happened to throw a billion at a long shot and have it pay off.

At 1,245 million liquid with another 800m or so listed. Burned 500m for The Crazy 88's - Virtue Chapter. I have to condition myself to start following my own advice: 1 million is less than a percent of my total assets, so I shouldn't be paying attention to it. Still, it seems like a significant amount of inf. I've made some money on Gift of the Ancients, Obliteration, Luck of the Gambler, Impervium Armor, Positron's Blast, and Performance Shifter in the past day or two.

So, most of a week later, I'm at about 600m. I made a massive error in judgement, sunk a whole bunch of inf into a slow moving IO, and now the bottom has dropped out on the price. Basically locked about 700m away that I'll never see a profit for and will likely take a very long time to get any return on at all. Time to eat the listing fees and free up my slots, because the opportunity cost on keeping the slots full for a second weekend is too high.

I've begun slotting my Scrapper. I found the difference between level 50 IOs and level 35 IOs to be less than half a percent to my Smashing and Lethal defenses, so I'm buying up all my sets as I continue to level past 36. Significant amounts of inf disappeared into a single Obliteration set, because I was impatient to slot up Lightning Rod, but I'm lowballing and waiting on the rest.

It was entirely a case of not following my own advice. Instead of cutting my losses when the price dipped a bit, I hunkered in to wait... and then the price dropped more, and more... and the bids I had in kept filling... yeah, it's a mess. Oh well. It's not like it'll take long to make back. I'll be over a billion by the end of the weekend, most likely.

As to my scrapper: Yeah, I'm finding Obliteration to be rather rare! I'm almost tempted to stray into multiple-of-5 territory, but I'll hold off on that until the 40s.

I've got a build set up for I19 that has scapped smash/lethal defence, Hasten with less than 20 second downtime, and enough Accuracy and To Hit to hit a defense-capped +2 95% of the time. Sadly, it's not nearly as expensive a build as I had hoped, and only uses one purple set.

Glad to see that this thread is still being updated.

Great work!

Glad you like the thread Jetpack.

I'm adding a new tip: After you make your first million from vendoring recipes, start crafting generic IOs. Even buying the recipe from the table and paying for salvage at Buy It Nao prices, you can make a very nice return on the high volume IOs (accuracy, damage, healing, defense, resist, endurance reduction, endurance modification, recharge reduction).

I've just recently started going for Field Crafter. Well, more specifically, I wanted to expand my Salvage inventory, and found the crafting badges to be the fastest way to do that. In the course of making some Accuracy, Damage, and Healing IOs, I made almost 50M for about an hours work. They sell almost as fast as I can list them if I'm willing to list them at break-even pricing, and generally return a 50% to 100% profit.

I'm spending money faster than I can make it right now, as I'm in the market for 3 Kinetic Combat sets and 3 Obliteration sets. Kinetic Combat is EXPENSIVE. Worst thing is, I really need one of them to day, to maximize my defenses for an AE arc that contains a fight with an Extreme difficulty AV that has a Dominator primary, Scrapper secondary, and three mid-fight ambushes @.@ Crazyness! I'm also hoping to hit 38 before the big event so I'll have Weave, which should bump my defences up above 35% at level 38.

This morning I had about 150M liquid and... well, I dunno how much in assets, 'cause I wasn't paying that much attention.

That's actually what I ended up doing. 5 large defense inspirations softcapped me to the AV's damage type for the duration of the fight. 5 large accuracy inspirations let me ignore her SR secondary and keep DPS'ing through Elude. 5 large damage inspirations let the fight end before I ran out of inpsirations. Spending almost 5 million Inf in Buy It Nao inspirations on a single fight, just to back up my RP claims? Totally worth it.

*edit* Oh yeah, floating around 350M this morning after finishing out almost all of three sets of Kinetic Combat and Obliteration, and picking up a LotG 25 at Buy It Nao price for my level 38 power that I got 15 minutes before the start of the RP AE event.