What is Flipping?

• Beginners get cannibalized

The Marketplace

1. First Scenario
   
2. Second Scenario
   
3. A volatile Market

Buying & Selling Margins

1. What are margins?
   
2. High volume
   
3. Medium volume
   
4. Low volume

The different type of merchants

1. Beginners
   
2. Average Merchants
   
3. Market Masters

Game updates & Valuations

1. No item sinks
   
2. New Items
   
3. Example:
   
4. Example:
   
5. New uses for old items
   
6. Timed Investments

Finding your market

1. To be added

The definiton of flipping is "Flipping is most strongly associated with real estate, where it refers to a strategy of purchasing properties and selling them on a short time frame (generally less than a year) for a profit. ... This is a play on the market conditions rather than the property itself"

Not only does this term apply to real world situations but we can also tune it to our liking for our virtual markets, Flipping can be seen as a act of purchasing items with the intent of selling it for a higher price.

This sounds real easy right? Well you'd be wrong. Without the know-how or some insight into different situations, the market can be rough, so much so that it can consume your very soul/

Beginners Get Cannabilized

“I’ll buy an item lower than what trade chat is listing, and then sell it back at or above the bought price.”

Wrong! If you come into the marketplace with that sort of mentality, you’ve already forked over your hard earned money to those putting in the work. Trove is nothing like the real world financial market, but TREAT IT AS SUCH.

There’s no successful stocks trader in the world whose made millions of dollars time in and time out by simply “winging” it. There’s a level of dedication to their practice and this comes with strategy and patience.

Sure, you might flip a few items here and there by shooting from the hip, but in the long run you’re just going to lose money and hand it over to everyone else whose putting in the work. The five factors you need to keep in mind are:

• Practice
  
• Due Diligence
  
• Patience
  
• Research
  
• Relentlessness

As a merchant you need have to have the fundamentals on point, so you can continuously and meticulously approach the market in the most efficient manner. Lets start with how the marketplace works.

This should go without saying, but the marketplace acts as a middle ground for buyers and sellers that come together to exchange items for flux and vice versa. You’re literally trading an item/flux with another player - not an NPC.

Lets say there are 2 sellers in the game who want to buy and sell a Pearl of Wisdom at the same time.

Sellers place their offers at:

1,000 flux – Seller A
1,001 flux – Seller B

The marketplace will show Seller A's listing first as it's the cheapest price on the market, thus giving the buyer the best possible price for their purchase.

What happens when two sellers place an offer at the same price point? The Marketplace will place priority towards the oldest sell offer.

1000 flux – Seller A (Listing created 11:00am)
1000 flux – Seller B (Listing created 11:01am)

In the above scenario, Seller A will have their item placed first in the queue of purchaseable items as their listing is the eldest and thus holds priority.

I once heard a user in our discord chat say “How hard can flipping be really? It’s just a linear market”. This far from the truth, just look at the recent increase's in prices. Everything follows the same rule to a certain degree, what goes up, must come down.

The point being, the market is dynamic and always changes based upon the demand and supply of the players that occupy it – whether or not they’re a merchant. Everyone plays a role even if they don’t realize it, and this is one fundamental aspect you need to grasp, because it plays closely with predicating price changes.

One day you could be heavily investing in an item, and then all of a sudden, the item losses over 50% of its value you had invested in it. What went wrong?

You need to ask yourself, has the item hit its historic low? If so, has a recent update/Q&A affected the item? Is the item hitting its historic high? Is the item stable or has the recent update made it more useful?

These are all questions you should be asking yourself, which the veterans are already doing without a second thought. Need a visual? Refer to the flowchart below.
The above diagram is only meant to be a basic concept of how to approach any item. This is by no means a definitive answer for all investments, but should rather be looked at as a guideline for all new comers to the scene. As you progress, you’ll want to improve upon your methods; time and time again.

You’ll often hear the term "margins" being thrown around quite a bit in the flipping world. To better understand margins, let's go over the basics

Simply put, the margin is the price difference between the price you buy and sell your items at. We're going to speculate here that you're lowball flipping, this essentially means that you're risking a minimum amount of flux however you're not making much back in return, thus your ROI is low.

Need a visual?
The above image shows myself buying mushrooms for 5 flux each, this is by no means a stable price, but it's one suitable for testing nonetheless.
Within this image you can see the mushroom have sold, 250 of this item for 1500 flux, thus each mushroom sold for 6 flux each. Giving me a profit margin of 1 flux per mushroom sold. This might seem small, but when you're selling 1000's at a time, the profit per hour swiftly increases.

High volume items include things such as resources, more specifically mushroom chunks, bottles, faerie dust and sticky ichor. I would classify these as the safest to check margins. The margins are so thin, that even if you refer to our charts, you’ll want to check the margins in game regardless. Prices are always changing and with the margins being so thin, you’ll want to know where they stand when you’re looking to flip them.

*Examples are not given as what to flip, but rather real visuals for you to review

This is where the gray area comes into to play. You have this situation where you could make some hard earned flux from these items, however most of the time the prices on them are so volatile due to events that it's not worth the risk. Personally I prefer to stay away from them.

Examples:

• Allies
  
• Mounts
  
• Emblems

The less an item is being traded, the less control the overall community holds over them - sacrificing the power/control to more experienced merchants. Unless you’re comfortable with losses or holding onto items for hours or days on end, then you’ll want to avoid this category. However, this is not exclusive for all low volume traded items.

You may on occasion find items that are pretty cheap, have a low volume and provides essentially no one any form of control. The key to a merchant using low volume items to their success is how much of a demand and use that particular item has. If an item has no use whatsoever, then you’re more than likely going to lose money, or have to wait a long time before you can sell it back.

Examples:

• Dragon Crucible
  
• Dormant Dragon Eggs
  
• Exclusive Mounts/Allies

If you’ve made it this far then obviously you want to advance yourself as a more skillful merchant and provide yourself an edge over others. This is key to being one of the most successful investors in game.

• Think for yourself
  
• Be critical
  
• Don't accept mass movements as set and stone facts
  
• Always analyze price trends
  
• Consistently keep up to date with developer blogs, trove Q&A streams and updates
  
• Keep notes of anything you find valuable for short and long term market impacts
  
• Understand what other players are thinking and why
  
• Learn how to value new items
  
• Remain aware of your emotions and don't let them impact your decision making

These are just a few things you should be continuously working on as you develop your methods on flipping. There are of course, varying levels of skillful merchants who exercise these better than others. I’ll categorize them as: beginners, average and market masters.

These categories aren’t meant to target anyone specifically or place him or her into a specific group. Any player can share traits from beginners to masterminds and anything in between. This is meant to help you the reader, visualize how the market is setup and how you should view yourself to further advance your practices.

First you have players who are just getting their feet wet. These players have virtually no experience flipping and are most likely to quit. This plays a bit into psychology.

A beginner is more susceptible to quit if they try flipping and it doesn’t live up to their expectations, or worse, they fail all together to make a profit. This negative experience will keep them from flipping, as they couldn’t get off the ground running.

Where as if a merchant was successful on their first day and exceeded their expectations, they’re more likely to stick to this form of money making - despite any potential losses in the future. In the future if they start losing money, they can relive their first day, remembering how at one point in time they were earning the type of money they had expected to make, and at the time of their loss, they believe they’ve done something wrong.

A positive or negative first experience can almost always make or break a new player, but here are some of the more common traits these players hold:

• Uncreative
  
• Ask around which items are worth flipping
  
• Mimic others in attempts to replicate their success
  
• “This is crap. I can’t make any money”
  
• “Flipping makes no money”
  
• “What the hell is that item?” – Unaware of updates

Furthermore, they might try and replicate a merchant they saw on YouTube by copying their flips almost precisely, having no creative sense of mind or simply want to have their profits handed to them on a silver platter.

The average merchant makes up the largest slice of the pie in the investing world. The skill set in this group widely varies and few ever make it to the mastermind category.

Common traits:

• May or may not focus on Stream Q&A’s, updates, dev blogs
  
• May or may not keep tabs on valuable information
  
• Flip common items: barrows, pvm drops, etc
  
• Allow their emotions to dictate their decisions
  
• Are part of the mass movement – Unable to predict any price movements (short or long term)
  
• Are not long term planners, and think short term

I’ll classify this group as the herd, as they move as one and react to the emotions of each other more so than that of masterminds. This category is single handedly responsible for skyrockets in value and crashes. This doesn’t mean other players aren’t included in hypes and panics, but these are some of the first to take part of that mass movement.

Unlike their mastermind counterparts, they may watch streams, read blogs and updates, but don’t give too much of a second thought about how they can plan for the future - and how those three sources can impact the economy.

This category is generally also uncreative and will stick to the same few items, keeping their risks at a minimum – but, they’re more tolerant of losses. So, unlike the beginners category, this group is ready to bounce right back up after any losses they might face.

The elite of all merchants out there in the game. Again though, you could be an average merchant and still share some of these qualities. These merchants however, are by far the most comfortable with risk.

Losses are not foreign to them and accept them as part of the process. Excelling in every possible category is something they strive for and meticulously work on improving upon.

Common Traits:

• Long term planners
  
• Read every blog, update and watch every Q&A stream
  
• Keep tabs and notes on virtually anything they may find useful
  
• Excessively patient
  
• Comfortable with big risks
  
• Excellent at diversifying their investments
  
• Comfortable with flipping the most valued items in game
  
• Not always, but can be market manipulators

Masterminds are exceptionally patient and can hold onto investments for months on end without feeling phased. They’re most likely to flip new items released into the game, taking on the biggest risks, trying to churn incredible ROIs that only happen every now and then.

They could hold onto notes and information for months, anticipating the day that the developers will enact the change they once stated in the past. Once they do resurrect the idea, they’ll be prepared with their massive hoards of items, selling them off to the mass public that waits for the moderators’ confirmation to start investing in those items as well.

There’s only one party who benefits from this, and that’s the early investors. If you ride the wave just like everyone else, you’re quite literally handing your money over to this category that have literally been waiting for this moment. Even worse, you risk the possibility of making little to money, or even losing money all together.

Case in point; make all attempts to escape the hive mindset. Think for yourself, remain patient, keep tabs on everything and diligently work on improving your methods – remaining content allows others to soar past you.