Runescape: Merchant on the Grand Exchange

Making money by merchanting is very simple. The hard part is making a lot of money in a short time. It’s possible but it will require a lot of patience and mastery of skill. This guide will explain everything about Grand Exchange merchanting. It will make it very easy and clear how to make money both short and long term. I will remind you that this isn’t for the faint of heart. It will require both time and patience. You sometimes will lose money but that is part of the game.

The Most Basic Concept

The most basic concept that everyone usually just goes briefly over is what a merchant’s task is all about, buying low ahnd selling higher later. As easy as that sounds it’s not. You have to be able to find items that people will sell at a low value one minute then higher at another. The Grand Exchange makes this harder as you are completing with everyone who is either buying or selling at the same time as you. Essentially limiting your ability to sell or buy at the price you want to.

Looking at Graphs

I personally haven’t seen anyone that has actually talked about this. When Jagex released the Grand Exchange Beta on their online website I almost died with delight. Think of it as a tracker for all the tradable items in the game. The amount of information is priceless and makes a merchants job that much more enjoyable. Instead of manually testing the prices or learning the prices from friends or other sources you can look at the exact prices and how they changed.

The following graphs come to our first examples. As you can see I am looking at the 30 day scale so I can see more of a pattern. The idea is to tell if the value of the item is below average or above average. If it is below average you want to buy and if above, sell.

This is an example of when I would buy.

This is an example of when I would sell.

Stay always from these types of items.

Prediction is the Key

The harder part at looking at graphs is to predict if the item will continue rising. You have to keep in mind of recent updates and possible new ones. One of the best examples is the player vs player worlds update that wasn’t released so long ago. The majority of player vs player related item soared up after the release of the update. I personally made a small fortune off of it by noticing it and taking advantage of it.

Trading Volume

Of course you can merchant any item but the idea is to trade very expensive items or low value item that has a high trading volume. Of course you can buy 25 thousand buckets at the minimal price then try selling it at the maximum later on. The thing is that you need to be able to buy a lot quickly and sell a lot quickly. If only a small amount of people are trading the item you cannot get the volume you need to make any decant amount. This is mainly one of the bigger details missing when people are trading and commonly made.

Maximum Amounts

This is sometime people don’t tend to run into but I must put it here for those richer players. Yes, Jagex is trying to prevent merchants from buying at a massive scale. So they set limits that a person can buy for most items. While I do not know all of the limits for each item I can tell you that the limit usually appears at around 25k. Remind you, some items do not have the maximum limit. Then, on top of that, you have a set time between when you can buy and sell the same item.