# Forum > MMO > Guild Wars 2 > GW2 Guides >  Auction House Pro Tip

## Martin240

This seems to be a mix of a guide and usage of what seems to be a bug in the auction house buy and sell order logic.

Today I started trading and I noticed that the bigger your item buy and sell orders, the longer it takes the auction house to get rid of your stuff. So instead of buying and selling huge stacks, just start it slow with stacks of 50. My orders are usually filled within a second or two and I can resell anything right away. As the auction house system is really fast moving you need to pay close attention on what to buy and what's not worth the effort. I just made 20s to 1g20s within roughly one hour with this little trick. Here are two screens so you can see it for yourself and get some ideas on what to sell.

First screen: buying.
Second screen: selling.

http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/4113/capture0j.png

http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/1963/capturehngd.png

Maybe I should also mention that there may be 30000 buy orders before yours, if you just do 50 the auction house will take yours. Don't ask me why, it's working that way. That should make the working of this a little bit more clear.

----------


## nuclear12347

Wow this has changed everything for me. I just made a lot of money using that method of jumping in front of the line. +rep for you.

This works like a charm even in stacks of 100 and 150.

----------


## dvicious

This could honestly be used to make a lot of money. Using copper I can buy ore(copper) at 16, and resell at 19 INSTANTLY. Not much profit, but the more you buy the more you make.

----------


## Teresa460

since release i sold alot of keys , all satisfied and live.

----------


## DXENEME

How do you make any profit?

Surely you lose all your profits in Auction House fees?

----------


## xysoulxy

does not really work for me... it sells instantly when I use the same price I bought it but if I go just a bit higher like 2 copper more it wont sell

edit: it works but it took 5 minutes ^^ I took the "in seconds" thing literally :P

----------


## Reiu

If you buy for 16 and sell for 20 you make 1 copper per copper after the 15% tax (5%deposit 10% sell ). Not really that profitable, but of course with the amount of copper that's being sold it can be decent - every 100 copper ore is 1 silver coin.

----------


## Buffdawg

I am a trader by profession (have not tried this in game but suspect it'll work similary) I suspect this is hugely exploitable at this stage in the game.

Using the 50/100 increments and 'budging' the line seems to allow you to front run against others selling larger increments. This makes sense because perhaps the system is working on a 'fill to kill' system so if you put in a 10000 sell order, it's not going to match it until it finds a lot of liquidity in the market. Whereas, if you are selling 50 (and maybe only 10 other guys are in front of you with 50 unit sell orders, then only 500 buy orders need to come in before yours gets filled).

To exploit this - you'll want to find items with the following attributes:

1) Bid-Ask spread of greater than 15% of the sell price of the item - the bigger the better - this is your profit margin
2) Large Buy and Sell orders - this is your liquidity - the larger numbers there are, the faster your orders get filled and the more volume you'll be able to pump through
3) Work down below the top 10 items lists - I suspect the profit margins will close out in the top ten list quite quickly as more people use this system... but will still be profitable (although whether time-efficient is another matter)

This is basically arbitraging and market-making in the item you are selling and you do sit on a small bit of risk in that an item will change in value for the minutes you are holding the inventory. But this is how banks do FX trading and why they have a bid-ask spread =)


Real interesting stuff... Might be able to run some technical analysis charts on some of these items and do some technical trading on this based on different server times. I'm sure there are alot of patterns you can discover and trade on too.

----------


## Gbyrd

Don`t think it`s an exploit, It is just how its working. TP is being used quite frequently if you look at all the stuff it is being sold rapidly.

----------


## cloudchng

anyone got short of item delivered? I bough 100 copper and only received 69 at the end. No more from "buying" and "bough" showed 100, yet in my inventory only got 69 copper.

----------


## Macpod

> anyone got short of item delivered? I bough 100 copper and only received 69 at the end. No more from "buying" and "bough" showed 100, yet in my inventory only got 69 copper.


Common bug.
Source: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/foru...first#post7508

----------


## Buffdawg

Hmm

been having a lot of success with this but then all of a sudden i put in an order for 120 items, I only get 20 'delivered' and then the money for the remaining 100 has gone MIA

----------


## cloudchng

looks like the trading post is not capable to handle such huge transaction yet.

----------


## psolarxis

is there a way to cancel your buying offer?

----------


## Buffdawg

psolar - goto "My Transactions" tab and then up top look for 'items i'm selling / buying' filter. You can remove both buy and sell orders.

I suggest you guys don't do this because their servers aren't able to handle it - you will lose gold because even if the underlying trades are profitable, you get screwed by missing items etc.

----------


## Buffdawg

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/foru...first#post7731

----------


## cloudchng

sigh.. i tried with smaller quantity, 50, got same issue, 24 returned only

----------


## cloudchng

dont wan to try anymore, got this ultimate 1, buy 50, received 5 only ..... no more trading

----------


## kj598

I don't get it, how do you buy cheaper and sell at a higher price?

----------


## Martin240

You place a buy order for buying cheap. Most people are dumping their items in buy orders to get quick money. This is what you are taking advantage of. You now list the items at the normal market prices which is usually a little bit more than the buying order. You need to make sure that the margin is more than 15% or otherwise you will lose money as there are auction house costs!

----------


## Nurideen

any informations about the auction house? when its be up again?

----------


## UDontKnowWhoIAm

It's back  :Smile:

----------


## Nurideen

not realy only gems working thats all...:/ and still no infos from them ass always

----------


## hahajung

yeah not working for me kinda.. put a buy order to a amount where i gain 1 copper when i resell and i dont get any sellers for my buy option D:

----------


## kamil234

there are quite a few items you can do this with. i started off with 8 silver last night, now im over 2 gold with about 3 hours i put into it

----------


## xysoulxy

what items did you use to do this? I also tried this but it was like +10 silver over 3 hours xD

----------


## kj598

Yes, can you give us some items you use? Thanks!

----------


## senzaki

This way is working well with copper atleast. buying for 16 c and selling for 20 c, makes 1s of profit every turnaround, and it takes on average about 2 mins to do one turnaround. So:

30 silver / hour, roughly calculated.

Not that good of a profit, but still a steady income if needed.

Now if this could be applied to other items with higher value, it would be more profitable, so please, if someone has any tips on other items that can use this system, share them!

----------


## flotos

buy exotics where there is only one in sell, and then selling for a bit more ? it could be good because the prices aren't really fixed.

----------


## UltimatePower

Seriously, you shouldn't use the TP to make gold. I had.. Quite some gold, and started doing fast pace % positive trades but due to the buggy, stupid and utterly useless system gold sometimes disappear. Which means it'll eat your profits up in seconds.

----------


## somaliasky

i started with 80silver 3 days ago, and I have 30g+ now and 2 crafting skill maxed. It works, but if you don't know how to do it in other games, then it wont work here as well

----------


## CoBx2k

> Seriously, you shouldn't use the TP to make gold. I had.. Quite some gold, and started doing fast pace % positive trades but due to the buggy, stupid and utterly useless system gold sometimes disappear. Which means it'll eat your profits up in seconds.


I call bullshit... Everything that ever disappeared for me came back a few hours later. If anything more than 1g would disappear from me I would do it as Anet specifically asked: Report it and they track down the trade and reimburse you.

For ppl looking for a bit more profit I can suggest to go higher stakes. The higher level Upgrade Components such as Orbs and their upgrades bring good profit for me, buy 20, sell them and make 1g profit. They often have a difference of 10s between for what you get them when you post an order and for what they sell.

----------


## Nurideen

dont like buying low selling high bec the tp is 4 all servers and so only some not good known items(i dont know them :Smile: ) will work, and copper sells 4 20-21c but bids alktualy at 18c so no profit...

but there are a lot other methods and the most use them 4 make gold.. salvaging.... startet 3 days ago with 10g now have 60g+ and this with not much time

----------


## CoBx2k

> dont like buying low selling high bec the tp is 4 all servers and so only some not good known items(i dont know them) will work, and copper sells 4 20-21c but bids alktualy at 18c so no profit...
> 
> but there are a lot other methods and the most use them 4 make gold.. salvaging.... startet 3 days ago with 10g now have 60g+ and this with not much time


Eleborate on this? Last time I looked there wasnt any profit anymore in buying on the TP, salvaging it and selling the results.

----------


## UDontKnowWhoIAm

Guys any help on how can I make some profit? Cause copper ore is reaaaaaaaaaaaal slow :/

----------


## flotos

Butter  :Big Grin:  buy 100 for 1 silver, sell it for 2  :Smile:  double benefit.

----------


## Reiu

> Butter  buy 100 for 1 silver, sell it for 2  double benefit.


Yeah, only you pay 5% deposit and 10% sales tax. don't forget that, as it makes it only 0.7c for 1 resell.

----------


## ziknos

I tried it out but the taxes are ****ing me :X

----------


## Thunderballs

Botting for low level stuff is profitable. Overnight you can do 2-3 gold and that is just getting rid of things to buy orders.

Obviously with the trading you are always trying to stay a bit ahead of the pack because markets do crash. 

Butter was trading at 1 copper then in a week it has risen several times and was around 5-6 (I believe) before the latest down for maintnence period). Either demand suddenly picked up becasue people are cooking scones all of a sudden, or it is gone up because of speculation.

----------


## Thrillseeker

Butter is one of the ingredients you can use in the temporary mystic forge recipes to gamble for some money and/or build a permanent portable mystic forge for yourself. Thats why the demand for butter and a few other highly supplied items has risen.

----------


## Mortox

wow unreal

I was doing flips for items worth 4-5g each, then someone undercut me huge (by about 1g) so I removed mine from the TP and just as I did that, the TP went down for maintenance, and they never appeared in my Pick Up tab. I decided to give the benefit of the doubt and wait at least a day or two, and still nothing showed up. Have a support ticket pending but who knows what will come of it.

That essentially gobbled up about 8-10g of my potential profit and set me back huge. Not very happy =/

----------


## Lichd2

You guys are thinking about crafting mats etc to make 1c->10s per but really the answer is more... yellow  :Wink:

----------


## pauk

well if you'd came up with a bit more usefull stuuff you would've deserved rep but now...\

----------


## babaa

selling exotic accessories(ruby) works okayish until morons start to undercut you for ~10c profit for them

----------

