If you haven’t already done so, you should read entry #1 below. This covers the very basic principals of the Trading Post that you must understand before you begin. Please also note that at the start of this tutorial, I had 3050 gold. I'm simply adhering to only spending 50 of that total amount to begin with and only then spending the profits earned from this diary. By the end of this diary series I should have 4000 gold (1000 gold profit being the target).

• How To Make Money #1

Before I start to detail what I’ve bought and why, I’ve chosen to pursue this experiment with only 50 gold. Some Guild Wars 2 players might think that that is a lot of money, but it’s easily obtainable just by running some daily dungeons and liquidating all your crafting materials. Although this Trading Post process isn’t fast with such a small pool of money, this diary of flipping can be replicated regardless of how much money you have.

So where to start? Firstly, it’s all about the searches. You need to find a wide spread of items that will yield a profit of 30% or more, with variety in your Buy Orders the key. What I cannot stress enough is that Flipping on the Trading Post isn’t about making huge profits on single items, it’s about making a small profit across many. It doesn’t matter if your Buy Orders get outbid, or you don’t get back as many items as you might want. The whole purpose of spread buying is to try to gain as many Flippable items as possible.

Using Gold Wars 2, I always try to customize and save my searches so that future searches are quick. For a generic search that includes all items, I set the profit margin minimum to 30% and its maximum to 75. Supply and Demand I set to 650. This usually catches a good spread of items of varying rarity. The higher you increase Supply and Demand the more common items you’ll pick up in your search. If you lower Supply and Demand, you’ll find rarer items such as Exotic items.

If I’m after a full spread of items (to include foods, clothing, crafting materials and weapons) I’ll start my search around 150 Supply/Demand through Exotic and Rare rarities, before making further incremental searchings:

• S/D 150 Rare/Exotic
• S/D 400 Rare/Exotic
• S/D 650 All Rarities

I also make sure, after searching, that I keep the list ordered by Spread. The reason for this is it provides a quick and easy way of providing a variety of items that yield a profit. Something that’s also key at this point is to avoid any items marked with a red (S). This icon indicates that Supply outstrips demand. Simply put, more people provide the item than actually buy it. In contrast, items marked as a (D) mean demand outstrips supply. These are always worth a shot as if you do obtain them with a Buy Order, you can almost guarantee it’ll sell.

For this first entry and with only 50 gold, I decided to try to aim for weapons, crafting materials and food. I generally buy any of either of these item types, but I do try to focus on those that provide certain attributes (such as Power or Berserker). With some exceptions, I’d recommend players try to avoid Air based weapons unless the profit margin is too good to pass up. For 50g, I ended up with a fair few items on Buy Orders. When you’re only paying a few copper or silver for each item, you’d really be surprised at how far 50 gold stretches. Here’s a few screenshots of the items I wanted:

Here, after 24 hours, is the majority of what I ended up with:

All of these items went instantly back up on the Trading Post (be sure to leave enough gold so that you can list your items for sale!) and in only a few hours, almost all of them had sold. What surprised me the most was just how fast the Rampager’s Staff and Cleric Bow’s flew off the Trading Post. I literally listed them and had the money instantly. After around 6 hours, the only thing left to sell was the Dire Aureate Musket Of Air (10 remaining) and the Steel Splint Legs (8) and 9 Iron Scale Chest Panels. In total, those items would probably provide me with another 5-6 gold. Having checked while writing this, I’ve only 8 Muskets remaining. Considering I bought them for as little as 10 silver each, I’m not too worried at this stage if they take a while to sell. Air weapons, as I noted previously, can be difficult to shift.

My total profit for the first 24 hours was 22 gold, bringing me up to a grand total of 72. Only 978 gold to go, readers!.

Have a question about the Trading Post? Items to buy? Gold Wars 2? Let me know! I'll do my best to answer.