Money making guide/GE
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Before the introduction of the Grand Exchange, some players would make millions buying separate items (such as god pages) and reselling as a set (a full set of pages) for significant profit, as many rich players didn't want to spend hours trading other players for single parts of the set. Now that the Grand Exchange acts as an intermediate between the buyer and the seller, this practice is no longer really profitable. Since all trading is so easy to perform in bulk, some players started buying and selling in a similar way to Wall Street. There are 3 main ways to do profit:
1) Buy an item where the price will go up, and sell before it goes down again (e.g. new quest/skill items). It is hard to know when to sell and costly if you guess wrong. However it's the only method that lets you accumulate compound interest for extreme profit. One example is magic tree seeds, which tend to drop by 3% or more whenever a new quest is out as rich players are too busy doing the quests to buy up the seeds, so demand falls and prices also fall. However, after a few days, normal demand resumes and prices again rise.
2) Buy items that some players are getting rid of, but that other players need in vast quantities. An example is vials. Their prices vary by as much as 5% daily. Buy for 2% under the average price, and sell for 3% above average price in another trade slot, and you will gain up to 5% interest on your total wealth with very low risk. This method is limited by how many vials the Grand Exchange will let you trade daily, so if you notice that your items are only selling in multiples of 1,000, start diversifying (for example, vials and vials of water and molten glass). Vials and vials of water, for example, cap at approximately 300,000 coins of profit a day, for 2 minutes of Grand Exchange-checking work.
3) As method 2 gets lower profit % when it hits trade caps, switch to higher priced items which are normally used up for lots of experience. The price will not crash down durably (prices will drop down during quests as many rich high level players are busy questing, and poor players and specialists keep producing the item). Expensive usually means trade caps will not matter, so you will be able to get about 3% profit daily on even a very large fortune. Good items for method 3 would be runite bars, high level tree seeds, uncut dragonstones, dragonhides and bones, and very expensive arrows/bolts types.
If you want to invest, follow these guidelines:
- It takes 156 days for 1 million to become 100 million if you manage to get 3% interest a day; it also takes 5.2 hours over 5.2 months to achieve, which is a 19 million profit per hour. Notice that if you work more and invest more in the first few weeks, it would go much, much, much quicker from 1 million to 10 million, saving a lot of time.
- It takes 117 days for 100 million to become 1 billion if you manage to get 2% interest a day; it also takes 5.85 hours (as you'll take an extra minute per day to check the price graph) over 3.9 months to achieve, which is 153.8 million profit per hour. For most impatient players this is a good time to stop investing and spending anything over 100 million in rapid skill gain and rares.
- Remember that coins cap at 2,147,000,000 coins (2.147 billion coins), so if you have the maximum amount and try to add one more coin, the game will tell you that you can't make a stack that big. If you keep investing past those limits (for the fun of owning a party hat set as there is no real point to being that rich except rares) then you will have to turn some of your gold into investments so you do not lose any money you make. This is why extremely rich people buy partyhats and keep them. Be careful, however, as partyhats have tended to continually decline in value ever since the release of the Grand Exchange.
- To find something in which to invest, check the Grand Exchange graphs on the RuneScape website. Items whose prices are rising are prime targets for investors, whereas items with declining prices will cause investors to lose money.
Here are some negative points on investing:
- Most of all, you don't get much money for your investment. If your investment is about 100,000 coins, you can only make 5,000 coins at most per day, which is very easy for most players to gather anyway. As such, investing requires a significant sum of start-up money.
- Prices change all the time, so sometimes a quest can come in and make your investment permanently or temporarily unsellable. This is why it's good to diversify your investments. As members get 6 trade slots, it is easier for them to diversify.
Long term investments by raw products is also another way people can make money. Raw products that are in low demand and high stock means that the price will be low in the winter especially due of the difference in numbers of players in the winter (as school is in session during the winter). These items can then be resold at higher prices during the summer, since there is a higher demand for raw products due to a larger number of players. Some examples of these raw products include:
- Runes
- Bars
- Food (raw and cooked)
- Rune essence
- Metal ores (Gold, adamantite, runite)
- Hides (suggested for members only)
As it takes months for seasonal investments to pay off, it's more of a "when to mine, when to smith" kind of advice except for when the American school starts or ends(which usually ends in June); on those 2 weeks 5% profit is probable and very low risk.
Six easy ways to make a few thousand coins:
1) Buy as many Chocolate Bars as you can, use a knife on them, and sell.
2) If you have 33+ Magic, buy law runes and an air staff(plus maybe a few emergency waters for Falador Teleport), and use Telekinetic Grab on the Wine of zaromak near the Goblin Village.
3) Go to the Blue Moon Bar with 56 gold, buy enough beer to fill your pack (2 a piece). drink the beer, and sell the beer glasses at the exchange for 45 each. (43 gold profit)
4) Buy woad leaves for about 32gp. Then go to Aggie in Draynor to turn the woad leaves+5 coins to blue dye and then you can either buy black robes and use the blue dye to make wizard robes for 357 coins profit or just sell the blue dye for a profit of 130 coins.
5) (Members only) If you have finished Death Plateau quest, You can buy Climbing Boots from Tenzing is for 12 gp each, and sell at the Grand Exchange for 300-500 gp each. You make 20k profit
6) Look for the item flax; its price varies by roughly 4 coins a week. Let's say you have 20 million coins, and you should buy this flax when its highest price is 74 coins a piece. Oftentimes it can get up to 78 and you will be able to sell it for that much and if you bought 100,000 which is now worth 78,000,000 coins, you would profit 400,000 coins, not even moving a mouse - just watching a price change.
 
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See also: How to add methods • Coding help | |||||
