I have started putting this together to help me with trading and the many questions I receive during trade negotiations. I will try to add more content and expand it continuously. What I am planning to write about are: how I started trading, how can you start trading, how to know the accurate prices, how to avoid scammers, how to trade with me and more. I divided it into sections for better navigation and “linkability”.
My first ever trade was well before I have actually become a trader, but it’s still quite memorable. Back in 2013, when /r/GlobalOffensive/ had only a few thousand members and top posts had around 200 upvotes I was very active there. The first operation nicknamed “Payback” was still underway and the passes were discounted. The now famous Etherfast made a post on reddit, giving away passes and I was one of the recipients.
On the August of that year Valve introduced “skins” and I started sniffing for business. Honestly I was at the right place at the right time. The price of everything was sky high compared to now and I could cash in on the early skin fever. By just playing the game, I received drops like anyone else and sold them on the market to gain some wallet balance.
As you can see, at the beginning even trading cards and simple everyday drops were kind of expensive. Weapon cases, especially the Bravo case sold for €1-2 weeks after their release. This allowed me some slow, but steady gains.
I started to figure it out how the community market worked and it was not long after when I started making a bit of a business out of it. In hindsight I have to admit It was pretty lame and inefficient. I was sniping on the market. I would sit and watch the newly listed items on the market. Every now and then I would see an item listed on a somewhat lower price than usual. To get them before anyone else I had to know the prices for most of the items so I could click “buy” without having to check the price every time. At most times I would earn a cent or two by listing the item on a higher price. Sometime I got more lucky and earned 10-20 cents or more even. Of course these transactions are pretty laughable as I literality had to work for them for hours. Should have found a better thing to waste my time on at the end of the summer, huh? Anyways, here are some of the more profitable ones:
I managed to work my way up to about €50 after a volatile day of the bravo case. If I remember correctly it stopped dropping at the rate it was supposed to after just a day, driving the price up. Meanwhile some people kept listing them on seemingly random prices. Here is a snippet from that day:
Not long after this I stopped market sniping. Nothing really happened for months, except I got some drops and sold those as well. Later I tried automating sniping with some relative success. When bravo cases were somewhere around €0.10 in price and the operation ended I decided to invest most of my money in them. I bought up 400 of them waiting for the opportunity to make some profit. The case’s price quickly started to surge in waves. I sold some at €0.20 and waited all the way up to €1 with some. All in all it was one of the events that later allowed me to enter trading as well.
I got into trading through reddit. I was lurking around on /r/GlobalOffensiveTrade/ for before I made my first move. I bought some keys and tried sniping “quicksells” as fast as possible. I was not very good at it, because back then I didn’t know about trade tools, etc. I had to manually put in every key, count and recount it before sending an offer. That put me in a considerable disadvantage. Still, I caught some cheap stuff that I put right back to reddit and lounge. I have done this for a while and kept improving my methods. For example I set up a system that looked for the “qs” and “quicksell” keywords in newly created posts on reddit and notified me. In case you are still in doubt, yes I was a dirty “quickbuyer”. Back then it did not have that bad of a reputation though, it was considered a normal and in a way essential part of trading. Then came the “go trad men”, “65% quickbuy” and similar russian guys from lounge ruining it for everyone.
Valve’s policies against fraud hurt this part of trading the most. Putting newly bought keys on hold slowed everything down to a halt. I had to adapt and change the way I traded so I grew my funds and expanded my reach by looking for trades on other sites as well. With some minor adjustments the way I traded is still essentially what I do today. To learn about what that exactly is just scroll down and read the next section.
Compared to most other big traders I work differently. Rather than dealing with extremely rare and beautiful gems, I trade more common items and go for the quantity. I advertise on CSGOLounge, CSGOTRADERS.NET, in some Steam groups and on the CS:GO Steam forum. I have also built a clientele of 2000 Steam friends and a trading group. In my posts I usually ask for downgrades with overpay, but in reality I do all kinds of trades, low to high, high to high, cheap items for an expensive, and more.
I used to buy "quicksells" as well, but that's been mostly dead for a while and completely since the newly purchased keys are not tradable anymore. Trading all kinds of items allows me to interact with all kinds of people as well. I try to have as many successful trades every day as possible. I spend hours a day taking, considering, then countering or accepting offers, chatting with people, writing comments, updating trading posts and whatnot. I describe my workflow below.
My profiles on the trading/buying/selling sites I use:
You can find a video below of my getting home, sitting down to my PC and going to inbox zero with trades, chat messages, friend request and all while explaining what I do. One of my friends said that it's really chilling to watch my go through my trades and I should be streaming it so I decided that I will do a recording. If there is demand for this then I might do this more frequently. It might be educational for aspiring traders and interesting to random folks, enjoy! PS: to find more content like this please subscribe to my YouTube channel
This section is a guide to help you trade with me. I always recommend sending an offer first where you can also add a comment of what you are looking for. If you want my help choosing an item that you can afford or want to discuss the specifics of a multiple item trade feel free to add me.
I am usually active between 9AM and 1AM UTC. On workdays I check my offers less frequently between 10 and 5-6.
As you have probably guessed I am trading for profit. I am not requiring enormous overpays like others and I can undercut trading site prices as well. Feel free to leave a recommendation comment on my profile after our trade, I will very likely return the favour.
Determining accurate prices is not easy and many people use different ways to do it. In this section I will identify and detail some of these and will also show how I do it.
One of the most common - though not the worst mistakes is relying 100% on what external pricing sites say. We are trading on Steam so we should use Steam Market prices, I will explain later how to do it well. Hitting up Steamanalyst, CS.MONEY or Bitskins is comfortable but it’s for the lazy. No, Steamanalyst is NOT smarter than you. It uses the steam market to calculate some kind of average. The price you get there is often inaccurate and misleading, not to mention "Community prices" which are awfully outdated, if they were ever accurate. Like 58 keys for an M9 Doppler P1? Give me a couple on that price too, please!
Another mistake made mostly by rookies is searching for the item and getting the “Starting at:” price as the actual price of the item without checking anything else. Some sites like CSGOSTash also show this price. “Starting at” is the price of current lowest listing of that item and it is wholly inaccurate when applied to rare items. On very rare items that price can be extremely overpriced compared to what it usually sells for. Some put their item up for sale for 150% or even 200% of the normal price and those items just sit there for months without takers. Even for not-so-rare items the current lowest listing can be pretty far away from a realistic price.
Some time ago I had a guy insisting that his ★ Shadow Daggers | Damascus Steel (Well-Worn) worth 75 euros because at the time that was the price of the lowest listed. This is actually a common way of cheating others as well, but I usually assume that the other guy just doesn’t know any better and try to explain it. This is in part the reason I created this section. Now back to this guy and his daggers. Glancing at the chart on the left you wouldn’t think that his knife is anywhere near €75, would you? I don’t think either, It hasn’t sold for that price even one time for months. A fair valuation would be around €60-61 in my opinion.
Very similarly people can argue that the item’s price “dropped” and it’s worth much less than before. They say that it’s now worth as much as it was last sold for. You can see an example on the right. It’s the chart of ★ StatTrak™ Bayonet | Doppler (Factory New). You can see that it sells for around €240 most often, but the last time it was sold for at an especially low price of €200. This does not by any means counts, it was one single transaction and it does not set the price of the knife.
Cheaters can apply these tactics whenever it fits them. When their stuff sells for high they argue that it’s the new price trying to make you overpay. They also try to send offers when your item’s price is “down”. Be aware of these and don’t make the same rookie mistakes.
My method of pricing is very simple. Before looking at the charts I ask myself: What is the price I think I could sell this item for in 2-3 day on the market? Then I analyze the last month, especially the last week of the graph. It’s easier to show than to tell, so let’s take a look at the picture on the right.
We are looking at the last month of the ★ M9 Bayonet | Safari Mesh (Field-Tested). All the lines and colors might seem confusing at first, but let me walk you through it. The only thing we have to have a good look at is the second red line. It marks the highpoint of the last few days’ sales. This tells us that every couple of hours someone was able to sell their knife on that price. If they could sell theirs we can sell ours as well. That is it, we have a fairly accurate price of the item. I further analyzed this chart to show you a few things. Marked by a yellow line I highlighted “quicksells”. These were impatient fellas who could not wait a few hours to get rid of their knives or they were in a hurry to spend their money. I speculate that these people are impulse buyers who want to have a new item or a new steam game right away and rather than waiting a bit they throw away a bunch of money.
Moving on to the last two weeks of the chart I highlighted two things. With light blue a very clear downtrend and with a darker blue a possible recovery initiating. The market moves in both directions over time. The causes of downtrends are usually major game releases, steam sales and new cases or operations. Uptrends happen either when new players enter the playerbase or when existing players have more money to spend and are more confident in the market.
When items are more rare getting an accurate pricing becomes increasingly difficult. Take a look at my next chart. It’s the last 40 days of the ★ StatTrak™ Huntsman Knife | Forest DDPAT (Battle-Scarred). I has been sold only three times over this time period from the low of €52 to the high of €69. What is the price then? If you can’t tell by it’s own chart let’s try its more popular brother’s. The Field Tested variant is around €72-74 so that is a start.
You could go on checking both in non-Stat Trak and measure the price difference there. For example if the price gap is €5 which would be around 10% of the price, then you can discount the Stat Trak by 10% as well arriving to €65. You might apply a bit more discount because of its rarity and let’s be honest, its undesirability. This is the end of the pricing section, I plan to write about patterns, floats, tiers and else in another section.
I have been getting questions about how one becomes a trader so I thought I would sum up my general response here. First, let me make that very clear that starting out with trading in the current climate is extremely hard and I don’t recommend doing it. The reasons for this are many, but they are neither obvious nor simple. I already detailed how I started trading in it’s own section. The thing is that it’s not really possible anymore.
You can’t snipe items off the market because of bot overgrowth, you can’t invest in cases because their price does not go up, or at least not that quickly. You can’t get quicksells because of Valve’s policies and because so many others started doing it then it has just died. If you seriously set your mind on getting into trading I recommend putting in some serious cash and time to get anywhere, but that is just my two cents based on my experience.
If after reading all of this you still want to give trading a try give my YouTube channel a look. You can see how I do my trades in the trading sessions. By watching them you can learn all the tricks when it comes to actual trading. I am also making more how-to like videos soon, stay tuned!
Good reputation is very important for me. I have been called a scammer by people who don’t think it’s possible to become successful without cheating. That is essentially the reason I wrote this section, this way I can just link to it whenever my reputation comes to doubt.
First let me emphasize that you DO NOT have to trust me. I try to do everything that is possible through steam trade offers. This way there is no possibility of anyone getting something other than or less than what they were promised. Still, if you need confidence to make deals with me I gathered some reputation info here.
Profile “+reps” are not a very good way to determine trust, but I have gathered 742 pages of them, which adds up to 4000 over 5 years as of this writing. I have not used them in a while, but I am +51 on steamtrades, and have 78 in my CS:GO REP! Cash thread.
I am level 350 on Steam, which allows me to have the maximum (2000) friends. I have made over 38,000 trades and 60,000 market transactions on Steam. I have a great inventory of thousands of items that I would not dare to risk over some petty scams. I don’t hide behind silly nicknames and private profiles, I am very open about who I am, you can find my social media here on my site.
I have been getting increasing amount of messages about profiles that are made to look like mine. I only have a single account with level 350, it's linked in the “Trade with me” section. I WILL NEVER ADD YOU if you don’t especially ask for it. These profiles often take my inventory link and put it in their description, making it look like it’s theirs. They are trying to use my reputation to make people send their items first in some real money transactions, "verifying" your items or sending you scam site links. These are the the methods I have heard of so far.
I used to collect the links to my impersonators' profiles here, but there are so many and they change so quickly that I could not keep up with it.
This is what you get if you search for my name on steam, the top one is me, the rest of the 33 are scammers and this is only my most recent name...
If you get in contact with any new ones you can give me their profile links and I will add them to this shame list.
I can’t do much more than reporting them and trying to warn others not fall for them.
You can initiate a steamrep
report if you have evidence, or just report them on steam directly:
Having many items has disadvantages as well. Other than the constant swarm of scammers trying to infiltrate my inventory, there are beggars as well. These are mostly kids from poor countries or unfortunate circumstances. They beg, lie and even threaten me to get free items. They often invent stories of dead relatives, say it would make their dreams come true or set them for life. I have a zero tolerance policy towards them.
In my view giving away my items for free would not even count as a charitable donation because the recipients are not really in need of the items. Like does anyone really NEED a knife or a nice skin for a video game they waste their time on? I think not. And if I wasn’t trading I would very likely not have any expensive skins and especially not a knife. By this standard it would mean that I am giving away a luxury to others that I would not spend my OWN money on for my OWN use. That would be insane, right? Yes, it would.
You could argue that they don’t want the items, they just need it’s value and I accept that argument. But I can’t reward begging, which would mean that I am rewarding laziness. In that case these young fellas would just learn that there are folks out there giving them something for free when they ask. I don’t want to support the imprinting of this expectation.
There is of course the argument I often get in some form or similar to “but it’s nothing to you man”. This is absolutely false, it’s something for me. I worked and am still working hard for what I got. Implying that a knife is like a piece of candy for me that has no value is just laughable. Even for the cheapest knives I probably work days for, would you think that days of my life worth nothing for me? If you do, you are very very wrong.
There are some cases where people are in real need and they ask for a donation. Unfortunately on the internet everyone can claim to be whatever they want to be without others being able to confirm it. This leads to many made up stories and fake charities. So even when someone is in real need they cannot prove it. Even if they were able to, how do I choose who gets and who doesn’t?
This is a real dilemma that many others face in their everyday lives. In reality the answer to this question is not that complicated. The ones most in need get it, right? Well, kind of. In my view we should give money where it can be most efficiently used. The GiveWell organization has an audited list of the most efficient transparent charitable organizations around. On the top of this list as of this writing is the Against Malaria Foundation. This org distributes mosquito nets around African countries efficiently decreasing child mortality rates. So think this through, let is sink in then ask yourself. If you are one of the people asking for your “dream items”, do you really think you would use the money better than an african kid without protection against malaria spreading mosquitoes?
So please don't be one of these guys: