Guild Wars 2: How I made effortless Gold in Guild Wars 2 by Making Markets
Alright its been a while since my last post. I've been playing a lot of GW2 and I really like it. The art in the game is amazing (I don't mind load screens!) and the economy is pretty vibrant / fun.
One of the first things I noticed about the markets was that there were numerous opportunities to speculate to make gold. Although there are easier ways to just 'farm' gold, the following was a great exercise in combining my professional knowledge of markets and leverage it into a competitive advantage in a game. The following is a description of how I was making 2 gold a day with very little effort.
I was making the market in 12 slot cotton bags for a week.
What do I mean by 'making a market'? I was consistently and simultaneously buying and selling at the best prices in the market. That means I was the highest bids and lowest offers.
Why 12 slot cotton bags?
I looked around the marketplace for a while, looking for items with a wide 'spread' (the distance between the highest buy and lowest seller in % terms) AKA (Sell_price-Buy_price)/Buy_price. 12 slot cotton bags ATM is 8 silver wide! (12am cst http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/9411)
This is a hypothetical profit of 40% for 2 transactions! Unheard of in trading (although last night I found out a tick in Nikkei futures is $125 - why would anyone trade that???). Anyways, also using http://tpcalc.com/ to gauge my transactions costs, profit comes down drastically to 13.6% in today's market.
How much can I make in this market today?
I was buying 10 bags at a time without a problem. The turnover on 10 bags was usually about 1 hour. Right now thats about 40 silver / hour for doing absolutely nothing.
What are the risks?
1. Building up an inventory. The second you buy a bag, you really want to sell it. The risk of owning 40 bags and listing them @ 28 while sellers move the market lower to say 24 is pretty big. You will lose big from transaction costs if you have to continually re-list your bags.
2. 'Pushing the market' - Assume the market was in equilibrium before you came in. There was a 'natural' spread between buyers and sellers with a normal sum of transactions per day. Now that you are participating in the market, with a lot of volume in order to make a good profit, you will naturally 'tighten' the market. You need to be aware of your own effect on the market and adjust your buying / selling size and frequency in order to maintain the natural relationship between buyers and sellers. AKA don't be obvious.
Go try it for yourself! Comment below with your successes and failures!
