Ebil Marketeering... the "diet" version?

Well, I used to have a corner on the Essence of the Earth inspiration (EOE). These inspirations are the only thing that provide damage resistance to Hamidon damage, both in Hami raids and in the 3rd mish of the LGTF. They only drop from DE Monsters located in the far reaches of PI or Monster Island.

Time was the market would have swings where I could purchase them for about 20K then wait and sell for 2M or more a few weeks later as there would be a raid and I was the only supply. Currently the supply seems to stay between 10-20 and sells for 1M. Some opportunity there I think. Folks making MoLGTF runs pay LARGE amounts for these still.

The problem in my head is that I don't know what your financial goals are.

It SOUNDS like you could do a business in, like, generic EndMod/RechRed in the 35-40 range and be happy, but you only make 100K or 200K on each of those, so a couple million on a 10-stack... compared to 20 million on a single good set IO. You can make a billion on those, eventually; I've done it. I don't know if you get more satisfaction from the activity or from the wealth, though.

You can do volume sales by using one toon to buy up recipes and salvage - craft 20-40 IOs and then have 2-3 toons selling your stock. Becoming the sole supplier of something is unlikely but you certainly can do volume sales in many, many things. Try Doctored Wounds or Numina IOs at lvl 50 to start.

I don't think anyone's currently playing hard in Thunderstrike or Crushing Impact. Or if they are, they're happy making around a million a slot profit. (Thunderstrike, Crushing Impact and Doctored Wounds are, I think, the most popular all-uncommon sets available at level 50. Red Fortune is another good one. The market may be temporarily distorted by all the Kinetic Melee guys running around. But the market is ALWAYS temporarily distorted by SOMETHING.)

You could flood the market with Kinetic Damage IOs.

Well, this is some fantastic advice! Thank you all so much!

I have looked into what was suggested and have formulated some ideas. I'll let you know how they pan out

Based on what you described, I'm thinking along the lines that Fulmen's
mentioned.

There is high volume turnover on Common IOs (Acc, Dam, Rch, etc.) in
several different level ranges.

These IO's typically only need 2 or 3 pieces of common salvage to craft.

They also can be memorized, so you can cut costs on those recipes.

With minimal base costs, you can even set up some storage, and run a very
decent production/fabrication shop that can be pretty lucrative, while
still being a fairly safe way to learn. You can do it without a base as well
if you don't want to keep any excess stock on hand.

Depending on exactly which IO you pick, you'll typically clear a few million
for each 10-stack you sell. I still have a toon or two that does that (more
as a hobby now), and one of them ran a Common IO niche quite literally
for years.

When you're comfortable doing that, you can consider the same idea for
more specialized IO's (I did it with Karma -KB's and Performance Shifter
+Ends for several months on one of my toons for instance). Keep in mind
though, that costs are higher, and there's more risk and often more
competition as well (I'd start with Common IO's first).

As an aside, "cornering the market" is a pretty risky business, and apart
from trying it once to get a sense of the perils, I don't really recommend
that - it's relatively easy to corner something, but quite a bit harder to
make a good profit at it, and practically impossible to maintain it for an
extended period of time.

The crafting approach is much less work, much safer, and much more
profitable over the long term.


Regards,
4

if you aren't hungry for huge profits I've found that you can basically pick an 'okay' set IO out of a hat (something useful but not super duper great), buy up recipes really cheap, buy up salvage really cheap, craft 'em and sell the result for a quick million in profit.

I've done this with enough different recipes to vouch for its effectiveness. And as noted, traditional choices like Thunderstrike and Doctored Wounds are perennial. I've also had great success with the 'off brand' defense sets- Red Fortune specifically, but also Serendipity & Kismet.

If you're happy with a million or so profit per slot with pretty quick turnover, there are a LOT of niches out there that would satisfy.

The way I found a few billion laying around was shopping for an enhancement but needing to buy the recipie instead due to a shortage or unexplanably high cost of the enhancement. Several times, I noticed that when I looked at the recipies there were no outstanding bids.

$$

Former niches that I'm no longer in as examples:

Doctored wounds heal/rch. Recipie bids would fill at 200k, crafted item would sell at 4~5mil. Full turnover of inventory in two to three days. It's high enough in volume that there's plenty of supply to be had cheap, but it's also effective enough that people seem willing overpay a million or four without feeling expensive compared to numina or miracle.

A year ago obliteration: damages were extremely rare (they still are) but there were several level ranges on the recipies that had no outstanding bids. So, I'd put up bids from 500k to 2mil, and sell the crafted item for 20~30mil. More than once I'd have the only enhancement selling at a particular level and I'd get 50million for it. Then someone made a mistake and gave me 300 million for one, but them's the breaks.

Two days ago I noticed another such niche that is about twice as profitable as doctored wounds was; I'm just waiting to see if it has the volume to be worth the 5 minutes a day it takes to get a billion a month. That is a lot of effort, after all.

It's not exactly what you're talking about, but I pretty much limit my market activities anymore solely to purples. They fit my lazy marketeering style perfectly. I can make obscene profits per transaction, and they turnover at just about the right rate so I only have to check the markets every day or two.

The long and short of it:

I looked into flipping recipes. Not really my thing. It could be, but that's something to look at later. I was/am more interested in straight flipping: I buy this for X and turn around and sell it for Y. Flipping recipes just doesn't appeal to me. I don't mind a 1-2mil profit, as long as its very little work.

I know, this sounds silly. However, currently I have most of my available slots tied up in bids "for later". I have a base I am attempting to fill to the brim with IOs that I use ALL of the time and some that I always wished I had. As you can imagine, this tends to tie up quite a few market slots...

Anywho - My plan part 1:

I did some research. Actually, I did a crap ton of research. I picked 4 kinds of uncommon salvage that are common to at least 2 "high end" recipes. I rolled myself up a new character, leveled him to 4 so he could hold a 10 stack of salvage, and gave him 100k.

He bid on 4 stacks of x10 for a "reasonable" purchase price on 2 of these items. The other 2 that I had picked were extremely lopsided in either supply or demand - 10k for sale, 1 bid or 23 for sale 8k bidding.

My plan is to watch how this pans out on him. His only job is to test the market on things and see about how long they take to move. If it goes well, I will then consider taking up some slots on a high level character and expanding out slowly into other pieces of salvage.


Why I don't like flipping recipes:

This seems to be a huge source of income for many people. For me, its not so great. The few toons I have that have storage enough to make this worth it are toons I play. I am not willing to run them around with full inventories for the sake of "making money". That seems very counter-productive.

Beyond that, being 100% honest here, crafting recipes is not worth the return for me. Yes, its essentially free money. Yes its very easy. Yes its not hard to do (in theory). But I find it to be tedious and not much fun for the returns. Beyond that, there's the time factor involved in doing this on a scale large enough to make it worth it. Its just not my thing

So, we'll see if my salvage plan works out. If not, meh. I'm not out much. If it does, perhaps I will dedicate one whole server to level 10 alts that only buy and sell salvage. Give em their own SG and everything. HA!

Thanks again for all of the advice!

Btw, I'm sure you're all aware of this, but there is a tremendous shortage of recipes and IOs from 25-45 right now. Some sets have 0 IOs for sale. Some have only a couple over those 20 levels.

Not sure who can capitalize on that, but there it is

*waves*

Yeah, the market is "hollow". I started (and then abandoned) Midlevel Crisis and Teenage Wildlife, hero and villain sides respectively, to try and do something about this. There's a little more action at levels 30, 33, 35 and 40. But not much.

Generally you can make pin money (although not huge sums quickly) in salvage if you pay attention and if you have the patience to let bids sit.

Last night, for example, I went to buy 2 pieces of Living Tatoo yellow salvage for recipes I actually plan to slot. No bids were currently showing; last 5 were 10,000-12,000 except one for 501.

Since there were zero bidders, I bid 500 (nothing) then 1000 (got one!) but couldn't get the other one for bids as high as 15,000.

So I reset my bid to 555, nice and low, and went to play with a buddy. Three missions later he logs off and I come back to find I've bought my one piece for 555 and the last 5 sales are:

100,000
250,000
250,000
250,000
100,000

I coulda made a little there if I'd wanted to.

I guess it all depends on what appeals to you, but at this point I personally wouldn't do anything but "flip" recipes. I started playing this game right when the market and invention systems were added, and I've gone though several levels of "marketeering".

My first method of acquiring wealth was farming Dark Astoria. That was great fun. I discovered months after starting that this chap Nethergoat was doing the same thing and posting results. I enjoyed lurking and following his results in this forum.

Once I actually started playing the market I started with buying stack of generic IO recipes and vendoring them. I made a "ton" of cash (all relative to the time period) doing that, but gosh was it tedious.

Then I got the Worktable accolade on my main and starting selling crafted memorized IO's.

But the more I IO'd out characters, the more it became painfully obvious where the real money was. People paid out the eye for crafted IO's. It was insane. So I started doing copious amounts of research and finding the most profitable niches. I would buy and sell within a couple niches at once until my fighting with other marketeers for recipe price dried it up.

But at some point last year, the tipping point of in-game influence seemed to occur, and now you can absolutely find niches that simply never dry up. For the last year and a half (with a sizeable break splitting it up) I've been buying/crafting/selling the exact same IO. The prices move up and down, but the split between the recipe and IO always stays strong. Always. I can always count on a 10mil profit on every single sale (worst case scenario), and I can sell 50 a week easily (mostly on the weekends) and could probably do more if I weren't lazy.

They don't take up space in my inventory at all. They sit in the auction house. One set of ten for sale, bidding on another set of ten and bidding on the salvage for that set of ten. Like clockwork. If I feel like I need more cash I'll throw out a few stacks of lowball bids towards the end of the weekend and those will cash in about half the time.

It's ridiculous how easy it is to generate influence. Obviously do whatever is fun, but imo you can't beat the ease of caching in on a recipe/enhancement niche.

Ok - I'm trying the recipe flipping thing. I will give it an honest to goodness shot and I promise I will not say "THIS SUCKS!" and quit 5 minutes in.

I have my niche picked out.

I tried a small sample on 1 character, and had good results.

I have enough inf that I don't care if it fails miserably - and if it does, meh, who cares

I have logistics questions though. And lots of them!

- Assume recipe A
- Assume recipe A requires 4 pieces of salvage
- Assume recipe A comes in many level flavors
- Assume I am only going to look at 5 levels of recipe A
- Assume that I am not using any level 50 characters for this
- Assume that I have a base, salvage storage, a table, and enhancement storage at my disposal.

These are my questions:

If I am limited to 15 slots on the market
- I spend 5 putting up mass bids on the 5 recipes
- I spend 4 putting up mass bids on the salvage

This allows me to potentially purchase 50 recipes and enough salvage to make 10 of them. Since I will not be getting all 50 of my recipes at once (darn it!), I must leave those 5 slot as "forever tied up". Once a full 10 is purchased, I can repost another 10.

If I want to expand some more, I can use 4 more of the 6 remaining slots to put up bids for another 10 of each salvage.

This leaves me with 2 spots to sell from. Not good.

So, I load up ye-ol-gleemail and send off 20 enhancements to myself (2 batches of 10). This takes 5 minutes of just emailing. (Yay?)

I then log on to alt vendor #1 and put 10 up. Then log over to alt vendor #2 and put 10 more up.

I check back later and collect profit. Yay me!

There has GOT to be a better way to do this

Can one of you major flippers help me understand the logistics of effective flipping?

Actually, it looks like I only have 1 all-encompassing question and not the many I thought I had. My apologies.

Thanks!


Edit: Someone earlier asked for my inf goals. I would like to make about 500 mil a month or so. This allows me to build whatever characters I want, outfit them to my liking and fits nicely with my time played vs money needed. I do have characters I play regularly, and playing generates its own levels of income + drops. So I don't require billions a week. That's over kill in my eyes. I also want to limit this time-wise to something I do maybe 15 minutes a day. I prefer to play a game I pay for, not pay to pay monopoly =P

I've only ever dealt in the top level of any recipe, commercially. I vaguely remember getting grandiose and trying to "Buy out" a pool B recipe [drops from mission completions] and then flip the whole range once. I lost about 50 million, couldn't even BEGIN to increase the price, and discovered that more dropped at level 50 than at level 30-49 combined.

I can't guarantee this is true for pool A, but that's the way to bet.

Ed: Most pool A recipes, possibly all, only require 3 pieces of salvage.

Am I the only one that just can't hang onto merits? I will have just made a sale for 200 - 500 mil, from a reward merit drop. I sort of have a post sale down feeling. So I realize that the char has another 20 or so merits. And I think, I'm saving those up.

But then I throw the dice.

Usually I get something nice and I craft it and drop it in the market for a nice chunk of future change.

But sometimes I get crap and keyboard meets head. None of my chars, and that's about 55 at this moment, have any RMs.

I have a serious problem.

@Misaligned:

There's any number of ways to free up slots at Wents:

-You could buy all your salvage in bulk with one character and throw it into base storage, to you be used by your crafter.

- You could by all the ingredients, craft and drop them in storage to be sold by another character.

- You could buy some of your salvage as needed instead of placing long term bids. This can generally be done for the first two salvages in a recipe without losing too much profit.

I personally just do a system where 10 enhancements are always for sale and I'm bidding on another stack of recipes and salvage. But I'm on a 50 with extra Went slots.

Depending on the health of your niche you might not want to sell more than three or four at a time anyway. You can always cancel bids as you need slots for immediate use and then rebid.

Well, I am flipping salvage on one character. That's going well.

If you feel the need to call crafting recipes crafting, then by all means, call it crafting. I call it flipping because when you buy a house, fix it up, then sell it for a profit, that's called flipping. I see nothing derogatory about the term myself.

Anywho...

I was wondering how other people manage the logistics of recipe flipping (err crafting, sorry). I read Fury's 0-bil journal in a week and know that for the most part, he did recipes. He did it with no outside help from other characters. Or am I mistaken in that he used some to hold salvage or something?

I am still confused how a single character makes this work without absolutely living at the market. There just doesn't seem to be enough room between the market and personal storage to make it all work in an efficient manner.


As for "locked in on a single IO and selling 2-4 at a time". If I can manage to sell 2 a day, every day, I would need to make a net profit of just over 8.4 mil per enhancement to meet my goal. This doesn't seem too terribly bad, but then again, I am confused as to the best way to do this logistically.

Thanks again!

Edit: I just did the math on flipping salvage. While a tidy profit, this won't get me anywhere near what I am looking for. At least not salvage I was looking at. =(

15 market slots.

1 slot = x10 bid on recipe.
4 slots = x10 bid on salvage.

3-6 slots = selling crafted enhancements.

That leaves at least four slots open for other random stuff, and as I mentioned earlier, if you need a slot for something quickly you can always cancel bids and repost as needed.

Or you can fill all of your slots with bids on salvage one night, come back the next morning, take it all and dump it in base storage, freeing up four more slots.

If you fill your bids for recipes before you sell your enhancements you either leave them there, carry them on your characters, or craft them and put them in base storage. I don't really get the issue.

I guess I can see the problem if you're wanting to focus on five different levels, as you mentioned earlier, but I personally don't see the point is branching out on levels. Generally speaking, level 50 IO's (or the highest level of the set if it stops before 50) is going to be the only ones that move enough volume to make it worth your while.

When I was operating on one toon I would simply buy up everything I need to make 10 of an IO on the one toon - craft them and list them. Granted I rarely ever wait on salvage bids - ill buy it now on salvage that isn't rare. That keeps market slots open for selling.

You want to find something that is X cost as a recipe and 2X -4X cost as a crafted IO. Generally a good thing to try is to find something with a cost of 20-30m , they will typically cost 10-17m as a recipe. Things like this include various lotg pieces, various pbaoe sets, various melee and ranged sets , basically anything that someone would want it probably sells well.

If you can clear 6-7 IOs a day at a 5m profit lets say, you will have 245m a week. I'll look into some specific ones to help you out tomorrow.