How much do you really need?

I wondered to myself - I said, "Self, how much do you really need to start marketeering?"

I would have answered myself, but then people would think I'm crazy...

*cough*

When I sat down to do some serious marketeering, I sent my marketeer 150 million. I figure that is what I could part with and have no real issue if I lost it all.

Well, that was enough.

As I evolved, I found I wanted into the bigger markets. This lead me to keeping about 500 mil or more on 1 of my marketeers.

I then evolved into serious lazy speculation. I would list mid-range bids on expensive IOs, craft em, and list em for cost - allowing people to over pay me what they thought my time was worth. Apparently people think my time is worth a lot lol. This caused me to have a 2nd marketeer with 800 mil+ on him (cash and bids).

As I was flipping through my characters I came upon my first "official" marketeer. She's on Freedom, and I decided to move shop as I find the market on Freedom exceedingly annoying.

Anywho, I logged into her and for some reason I had let 1 million on her. Probably a typo. Seeing this I said to myself "Self, what do you s'pose we could do with that million?"

Again, I didn't answer. Silly people.

I decided to give straight crafting a shot. I took my mil and looked into set IOs that were going for ~5 mil which had recipes on the cheap. I found one, bid on 5 recipes and logged off.

Came back the next day and *poof*! I had bought them! YAY!

After some bid creeping on the salvage, I had to leave up my lowball bids and walk away for another day before I had enough salvage to make the 5 recipes I had bought.

Off to the table!

Bam! 1 done! Bam! 2 done! Bam! 3 done! *bzzt* what the heck?!!

Oh dang... I don't have enough inf to make the 4th and 5th ones!!

Off to the market.

I list 1 using the 50% mark up method and log off since I didn't have enough inf to list 2 lol.

Day 3 now and I sold my enhancement! YAY!

I quickly take my massive profits and go craft the other 2 IOs. I then (being a tiny bit smarter) list the 4 IOs I have before looking for more recipes to buy. I bid on 10 recipes this time! (2 sets of 5) and I'm out of money again. *sigh*

Day 4 dawns with 4 sales and 8 purchases!

I am now in business people!

Here's my rules for myself (rules put in place to keep me from forgetting about her lol):

1. Check once a day
2. Craft in 5's (only go craft when you have all 5 recipes you bid on)
3. List in 5's (List all 5 and don't break them up - this way I am less inclined to up my price later)
4. Stop buying recipes with rare salvage *bonk*
5. List for mark up and hit "get all inf". Don't Look! Just grab it and go!

I buy 10 at a time, list 5, and keep 5 up at all times i check, with common IOs filling up spots, cuz those are easy cheap moneys. Plus i do this while afk, and i even fight with myself.. (2 toons, listing, and buying the same exact things...)

And i still make a decent profit, daily. even fighting with myself.

I've started with as little as 5000 inf before. that takes awhile to ramp up into serious profits though. my preferred strategy requires around a billion to get started on.

I've started with as little as 5000 inf before. that takes awhile to ramp up into serious profits though. my preferred strategy requires around a billion to get started on.

I agree it takes little to start. I once decided to see how much I could make without giving my toons anything. I did the tutorial...listed the large inspirations I got for cheap(they sold for a lot more) and that was enough to get me into the salvage game, and placeing and winning some sporadic lowball bids on some doctored wounds recipes which I crafted for decent profit. It all steamrolled from there.

My "First 100 million" thread started with something like 55K of cash and goods. I scavenged to a few hundred thousand and went from there.

I think of it as "doing different things at different levels of wealth." Under a couple hundred thousand it makes sense to buy up level 50 recipes for 501 inf and sell them for 10,000; it makes no sense to do that when you've got a billion inf.

Memorizing (or crafting) generics makes a lot of sense at 1 to 10 million. As does flipping crafted ones- buy six at 55K, list for 201K, sell for 250 or 300 K.

10 to 50 million it makes a lot of sense to craft low end set IO's (buy for 1 million, buy a rare salvage for 2 million, sell crafted for 5 or 10 or 20 million.)

Actually, it still makes a lot of sense to do that up to a couple hundred million... my test case on that is coming up on a billion, but I had a good run on a buy for 3MM, sell for 40MM thing or two.

And what is the best usage of time/effort/money for 51 mill+?

300 mill+?

500 mill+?

There's a lot of "Buy for 20, sell for 40" stuff that you can start getting into (if we extend the "sell for 10" up to say 100 million) for the 100-300 point.

I'm not sure what the "300M to a billion" stuff is. I think "high end orange stuff" has gotten moved into, or close to, the "buy 20, sell 40" range by tip missions.

At some point, around a billion maybe, purples are the way to go.

Actually, the guide in my sig covers what I suggest for getting your first millions. Salvage flipping can be very profitable (relative to amount of inf on hand) at very low levels.

Mostly this was an experiment to see if I could make a go of it crafting IO sets with only 1 million.

Re: Purples after a billion...

I still avoid these things like the plague. I've made a couple hundred million off of a few - but that market is extremely volatile and I'm not knowledgeable enough about what the "normal" price is to make my bids on recipes. So anyone wanting to jump into that market would probably do well to do a LOT of research on prices before jumping in.

I don't try to keep track of normal prices. I go for a very short timeframe- buy it and sell the crafted the same day, ideally. So far I have only gotten my fingers pinched once or twice, and you can make ... buy for 256M, sell for 350M, minus 6.1 million of salvage, 0.6 million crafting fee [round that all up to 7M], and a 35M wentfee, that's a 51 million inf profit.

It's dangerous, true, because sometimes prices just drop by 50 million, but there's good money in it.

And it burns a lot in market fees.

You can easily start with < 100 inf.

The only things that change are the niches you can invest in, and the time
it will take to reach an arbitrary wealth target (and the "time" part could
easily be argued even then).

Typically, I used these ranges (loosely speaking)

INF                       NICHE
 
1 - 15K                    Inspirations (bid 11 or so, flip for 1000 or so)
                             L50 SO's  (bid 111 or so, vend what you get)
15K-100M               Common Recipe Vendoring (definitive guide in sig)
                             Salvage Flipping
                             Lowballed set IO (crafted from drops/bargain purchases)
                             Crafting Generic Common IOs (Memorized recipes)
100M-2B                 Premium Set IO's including procs.(%Chance, Perf Shifters etc)
                             Purple Flipping.

I started with 150m and ended up with over 8b in a month. I'd say you can start with 90-100m. Really you can start with just 50k or so, and start flipping Positron's Blast, Performance Shifter +End, and other lowbie large spread IO's.

To run my inf creating machine requires about 11B tied up in the market over 25 toons. Of course I'm generating about 650M and managing 5 toons per day, mostly on high-end stuff.

When I ramped these toons up they all mostly started with whatever they popped from kills and I did stuff like flip alchemical silver (6k bids and 25k sells back then) and brainstorm farming (1k bids on base salvage -- turn 20 into rare salvage randoms for avg sale of like 1M or so) to generate their first millions....then I moved on to crafting generics and common set IOs. Eventually I move into buy/craft for 20 sell for 40 stuff which Fulmens mentioned. Finally I *cough*.....wait........move on to more profitable stuff.

She locks down niches. I raid other people's niches like a mammal eatin' dino-eggs. Her way is more profitable, but I could tell you everything I bought and sold, what my prices were, and it would have NO EFFECT on my ability to make money*.

* Well, I can't tell you, because I don't write em down, but it's the principle of the thing.

Edit: Deleted cause I'm slow and wasn't catching on.

For some reason, I clicked on the thread title expecting it to be about how much inf you need to stop marketeering. To retire, so to speak. I don't know what I was thinking!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZHCVyllnck

If I am building a bankroll on a toon merit farming ae is better inf/time for me up till the 250 mill mark. Then I can start reliably making more inf. marketing than rolling bronze.

What do you do with all the profits? I know it's nice to see a big number in your Inf column, but what do you do with it?

I don't want to have to marketeer just to buy the IO sets I want for my character. Several times I have not had enough to even buy the common IO recipes, so I don't bother. Doesn't spoil my enjoyment, just makes me wonder why you raise prices just because you can.

Unless you are making donations to the new players so they feel they have a chance in the market?