How I Started

My first ever trade

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.

Sniffing around for business

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.

Market Sniping

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.

Trading

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.

Pricing

Pricing mistakes

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 on external pricing sites. 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 twenty on that price.

A lot has changed since I made this, but it's still funny so I am leaving it

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. “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.

Not long 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.

Correct Pricing

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.

Reputation

What's trade locked?