Looking to flex my marketeering muscle

Gents,

I just reached the 1 billion influence mark for the first time, which is rather a big deal for someone as chronically impoverished as I am. I got there mostly through flipping stacks of rare salvage for profits of roughly 5 million per stack of 10. Eight stacks, sold twice a day, got me to where I am now. However, I am looking for new challenges. Prices on rare salvage have hit, nearly uniformly, the 3.5 million to 4 million range, and my footing has been thrown off. Is there a logical "next step" after learning the basic ins and outs of the market? Turning recipes into enhancements seems illogical, given the absurd demand for the "heavy hitters" of the rare pools. Do I expand into flipping some of the cheaper purple recipes, like Confuse, Sleep, or Stun? You don't necessarily have to tell me how to do it--I'm just looking for a general nudge in the right direction for making a more reliable profit using fewer market slots.

Thanks!

At this point there are a number of options available to you. Personally I opt to craft and sell the mid-range rares. There are a decent number of rares where you can buy the recipe and salvage craft it and make a decent profit. Admittedly profits on this have gone down since the AE decreased in popularity (causing the price of rare salvage to increase) but there are still profits to be made.

My main piece of advice with that tactic would be to avoid the big hitters. Things like Kinetic Combats Triples, LotG 7.5%s and Obliteration Quads are potentially profitable but tend to get a lot of competition so it can be hard to make a consistent profit. I recommend looking for the second string sets. the ones that aren't in huge demand but end up in a lot of builds. Within sets try to figure which IOs are most likely to be in higher demand. For example triples tend to be more popular than doubles and procs are often the least valuable. Positron's Blast is a good example, it takes time to sell through but you can buy and crafty the recipe for less than 10 million and sell it for 20million or more.

I'll admit I probably make quite a bit less than some people on this board with these tactics but it's a consistent and safe profit and I like that.

Lot of possible next steps.

It seems illogical to me that people would buy a crafted IO for 12 or 15 or 20 million inf when I pick up the recipe for 500K and the salvage for 3.5 million. But they do it. All the time. (level 50, positron's blast and performance shifter, to mention two where I've made some money.) If you look at the top level of any melee, ranged, AOE, defense, or resistance set you'll probably find at least one of those six IO's where there's a good, profitable spread between recipe + salvage + crafting cost, and cost of crafted IO -10%. "Buy for five million, sell for ten to twenty" is good for learning, because if you get bit on your second time through the system and lose your inf you are still ahead of the game; it's also good for the long term, because you can make a few billion that way.

Four quick notes:
1) List well under the "last 5"- I have listed a lot of things for 12 million that sold for 20. Sometimes the "last 5" on those was 15 million.
2) Until you get comfortable, work in small batches. This depends on how much attention you pay, vs. how much risk you mind.
3) Niches collapse, it's the nature of the beast. Sometimes they come back quickly, sometimes they don't come back at all. If you have something that's, like, "Buy at 1 million, add 3.5 million inf of salvage, sell at 40 million" do not be surprised if one day it starts selling for 6 or 8 million. (I think that happened to Impervious Skin Res/Rech.)
4) You can move into more expensive stuff, buy for 20 + salvage + crafting, sell for 40. Buy for 300+salvage+crafting, sell for 400. It's riskier. Some people pay more attention when they're spending half a billion inf. Fortunately, some people don't.

I've got a project character I'm working on right now. I rolled him during DXP, leveled him to 10, and what he earned was his starting capital. He should be breaking a billion in the next day or two. I know that's slow, but I'm fairly new to the "pure marketeering" method too.

Like you, I flipped salvage for the first while (though I worked on common salvage since I had almost nothing to work with). Then I got my 45-50 Common Defense IO memorized, and crafted and sold Defense Commons until I had about 100 million. From there it was all buy recipes, craft, and resell. I crashed a couple niches before I finished with them, and lost money as a result, but that wasn't a common occurence. After all, I'm nearing a billion with less than 10,000 on my Inf Earned badge.

If I were using a character that wasn't a "pure marketeer" I would be using a few other tricks, like ticket farming to get free rare salvage, and boosting my profit margin even more. Dig through the posts and guides here to find all kinds of useful tricks.

Right now I'm documenting everything I do on my marketing toons each evening, as a way of providing a demonstration of a marketeer in action. I started doing this on Feb 14 and I figure I'd wait two weeks to start a thread on what I'm writing down, so that I'm not giving people information on what I bid on recipes or salvage last night. ^_^ But other than that I'm pretty much noting what I bid on, for how much, how much I list for, how much I sell for, how much money I made. I figure it'll be a detailed example of how to buy, craft recipes, and sell and make money (or at least, how I do it). And if not that, it'll give people something else to read while bored at work, or whatever.

But basically it boils down to exactly what Fulmens said. I buy recipes for next to nothing -- say, Decimation or Devastation, Mako's Bite or Touch of Death, Scirocco's Dervish, Performance Shifter, etc -- and salvage (rare salvage cost more than the recipe itself usually) and then sell for a nice profit. In some cases the recipe sells for 1-2 million, sometimes even a lot less, and the crafted IO sells for 12 to 20 million or more.

One thing I would add to Fulmen's four points is: sometimes you have to be willing to defend your market. Try to keep bids in on both the crafted and the recipe. Otherwise you lose all control. But you have to be careful so that you don't choke on "worthless" supply.

Here's an example I saw last night that I thought was a good example. It's not me, and it doesn't look like much of a profit maker, but I thought it was someone who was doing a good job of keeping reins on their niche. I apologize if I am outing anyone's area.

Last night, I decided to pick up a full set of lvl 50 Blood Mandate for my grav troller for the defense bonuses. Normally, since I am OCD about these things, I would buy the recipes and craft them myself, but I looked at the crafted IOs first. All were ranging from about 1mm to 4mm apiece in the last 5, and last 5 were all in the past day. Ok, I'm willing to shell out 10mm on a chump set, but then I saw that there were 10-25 bids on each of the crafted. I really didn't feel like bid creeping (for 1mm to 4mm?! Did I mention the OCD?) in the face of competition, so I went to look at the recipes.

All recipes of that set are uncommon, and have cheapo salvage, and there are no outstanding bids on any of the six. So I throw in 555 inf bids on each of them and get filled. Then I throw in 17 inf bids on the common salvage and 777 inf bids on the uncommon salvage. All insta-fill. So I craft them all and get the full set for about 3mm total (crafting cost on each was 490,400 I think, so total cost per piece was under 500,000).

Now I'm thinking to make an example, because surely the crafters of this niche are not defending it! So I throw in 50,000 bids on each of the crafted enhancements that I know cost 500,000 or so to make, smugly confident that I will pick up dozens of them at 1/10 the crafting cost.

Nothing. Ok, I'm a little surprised, but that is good. So today I decided to take it a step further. Crafted another one of each of the set, again for under 500,000 each, and posted them for 600,000 each, figuring smugly that I'm going to hit their bids then rinse and repeat until all the 20 or so outstanding bids are gone. Nothing. Now I still have no idea where the highest outstanding bid is, or the lowest outstanding offer is, which is vexing, but is good for whoever is running that niche.

Assuming that is one person running that set, I see this as a great example of protecting their market. Put in defensive bids that are low, but not too low, and that are high, but not too high. Color me impressed. No smugness allowed for me, which is sad. Good job!

In case anyone cared, all 6 sold for 1mm each.