GW2: Going for 1000 gold – Make an offer

Buy low, sell high.

This is the glib response you’re bound to get from people when you ask them, how do you get rich. It sounds so easy, doesn’t it? Why, I just buy low and sell high. What could be simpler?

If it was so easy, we’d all be rich in real life. It’s not.

Even supposedly brilliant people don’t seem to be able to master this simple axiom and apply it in real life: Nearly 80% of large cap fund managers weren’t even able beat the stock indices during a 5 years period ending 2013. That means you’d have been better off putting your money into a fund that simply mirrors the market’s basket of stocks and let it sit there, rather than have some “smart” person who “buys low and sells high” actively manage your investments.

Fortunately for you, Guild Wars 2 isn’t real life: You actually can buy low and sell high and make game gold doing it. The trading post allows you to place what you sell on the market at a pretty reasonable price that’s likely to sell, plus it lets you buy things easily and quickly at prices below the posted selling price.

Here are two basic rules that will make you money when you’re posting on the trading post:

• When selling something, never take the offered price.
  There are some rare exceptions to this rule, but 99% of the time this rule always applies.
• When buying something, make an offer.
  There are more cases where you’ll break this rule, but it also applies nearly all the time.

Take the example of rags, below:

There’s a 40 copper difference between the buy instantly price, i.e. the ask price, and the place order price, i.e the bid price. If you’re buying rags in bulk, say lots of 200 (I do this almost every day: Rags are a great alternate source for silk scraps.), you’re saving yourself around 80 silver by making a bid and having a little patience (There’s that word, again.), waiting to have it filled.

So make an offer whenever it makes sense. Sometimes the bid price exactly or almost exactly matches the ask price. In that case, just buy it. That’s not usually the case, though. Get in the habit of making an offer and save yourself some money. In other words, buy low.

My total from yesterday: