Anyone buy/sell to try and make a profit?

[Per Mertesacker]

Just wondering if there were many people out there who specifically try to buy/sell cards for steam funds? I've only been involved in steam cards the last few days but it does seem viable when you see some people putting up their stuff VASTLY underpriced.

Anyone here treat it like a stock market, if so how's that going for you?

[BanzaiBob]

The point about picking up cheap foils is a good one. There are far fewer on the market and less likely to be dumped en mass, driving the price down. If you could get a stock of those, buy off the cheaper end cards, and then market your own at a higher price it may work out.
But just working with basic cards would be a long road. although with the sale over and fewer new cards being dropped it may be a good idea to play a waiting game. Each badge takes out at least 5 cards yet puts just 3 back - at some point demand should rise and those holding the cards can proffit.

[burn-jmsrgn]

Originally posted by TheRyanFace:

Slightly off-topic but these Summer Getaway cards... I'd have thought they'd be more sought after since the sale ended and they're not available anymore but they seem to be doing pretty averagely, price wise... Weird.

The tthing is, there were still about half a million summer cards on the market on the last day of the sale. I think the entire system, not just the market, is flooded with more summer cards than any other type by a huge margin.

[Also off-topic but wanted to mention because I didn't notice at first. This topic is on the Trade board. Trading board is default for "discussions" tab, General is now the 2nd sub forum. I imagine it's a solution to everyone that was posting trade topics even though the sticky asked them not to lol.]

[Shattered Stone]

Making money on the market is a crapshoot really -- you can refresh the latest deals every second and try to catch people missing a 0 or selling way below marketplace, but you can't really make any money on the regular spread and depth of offers or corner the market as the steam fees dictate that 15% is eaten before you can even start to make a profit.

The other problem is that you will be competing against bots doing the exact same thing and being a lot quicker at buying out lowball offers; Steam does ban those people occasionally, but they're still there. You are at a disadvantage doing that.

Furthermore since there are no buy offers (ala EVE), you can't really try to get people to quick-sell to you either.

You could try to treat cards as investments (say, summer cards which will probably never drop again), but that's a long game and incredibly risky with games (as others have said, a single sale on a game can destroy your margin). You also do not know what Valve is going to do down the line -- when are the second series coming out? Are the first series still going to drop? Will they increase the booster rate? Will they reset drops at some point? Will they adjust marketability? Not predictable.

The only way to really make at some dependable profit is trading 1:2 like many do now; for every trade you make on average 10-15 cents if you are careful not to accept trades of incredibly cheap cards for your incredibly expensive (relatively speaking) cards. The rate at which you do that is pretty darn slow unless you operate automated trading bots like backpack.tf or steamcardexchange (the latter relies more on inter-game spreads to make a profit, while the former collects a guaranteed fee on every exchange even intra-game). Unless you are doing that, you are likely better off just playing Diablo 3 a lot and buying trading cards from RMAH profits -- and that's still a lot less money than flipping burgers and spending the money made there on cards. Plus you have to compete against people with more time and bigger team fortress 2 inventories from years of idling dozens of accounts who can just get all the cards for essentially nothing. (TF2 "removed" automated idling in tf2 at the start of the summer sale, though technically it is still possible and people still do it just now valve will probably start banning people from trade if they run dozens, hundreds, or thousands accounts doing that with automation).

You can have some fun with the market and the trading if you treat it as a game and never look at time spent per unit of profit. I wouldn't be surprised that you'd be better off working on Amazon Mechanical Turk (which pays absolute CRAP wages around $1 an hour) and spending that money on cards.

[Navarre]

Originally posted by Zhurong:

Not a good use of time if you ask me.

The man summed it up. It would take days to make a 1 buck profit unless you're sitting on a huge pile of cards. You can flip burgers for 10 times that per hour.

[Per Mertesacker]

Originally posted by BanzaiBob:

The point about picking up cheap foils is a good one. There are far fewer on the market and less likely to be dumped en mass, driving the price down. If you could get a stock of those, buy off the cheaper end cards, and then market your own at a higher price it may work out.
But just working with basic cards would be a long road. although with the sale over and fewer new cards being dropped it may be a good idea to play a waiting game. Each badge takes out at least 5 cards yet puts just 3 back - at some point demand should rise and those holding the cards can proffit.

That's a good point, for every badge, two cards less are in play. But at the same time for every person that buys the game, there's another *whatever half of the amount of avails is* in play, so that'd offset it too... If badges are being made quicker than people are buying the game, the number will drop.

Originally posted by burn-jmsrgn:

Originally posted by TheRyanFace:

Slightly off-topic but these Summer Getaway cards... I'd have thought they'd be more sought after since the sale ended and they're not available anymore but they seem to be doing pretty averagely, price wise... Weird.

The tthing is, there were still about half a million summer cards on the market on the last day of the sale. I think the entire system, not just the market, is flooded with more summer cards than any other type by a huge margin.

[Also off-topic but wanted to mention because I didn't notice at first. This topic is on the Trade board. Trading board is default for "discussions" tab, General is now the 2nd sub forum. I imagine it's a solution to everyone that was posting trade topics even though the sticky asked them not to lol.]

Ah for real? The amount of times i've made sure i'm posting on the right forum, this is the one time I don't. :(

[Per Mertesacker]

Originally posted by Du Guesclin:

Originally posted by Zhurong:

Not a good use of time if you ask me.

The man summed it up. It would take days to make a 1 buck profit unless you're sitting on a huge pile of cards. You can flip burgers for 10 times that per hour.

Oh I know, it's not a case of "I'M GONNA GET E-RICH!" just one of, well I'm trying to make the badges anyway, why not pick up on the cheap cards I see and sell them back at a profit. I blame all the Theme/Tycoon games I played as a kid...

[burn-jmsrgn]

Originally posted by Shattered Stone:

You can have some fun with the market and the trading if you treat it as a game and never look at time spent per unit of profit. I wouldn't be surprised that you'd be better off working on Amazon Mechanical Turk (which pays absolute CRAP wages around $1 an hour) and spending that money on cards.

This is a big point. If you can have fun with it, and some people do in all kinds of markets like this or in-game economies, that is what makes it worthwhile. If you can get into it and buy yourself a cheap game or maybe some in-game (mann co, etc) items for yourself every now and then - then sure, why not?

[edit: and I mean REALLY cheap, aiming for really low titles or other items people sell on the market from TF2 or DOTA.]

[Per Mertesacker]

(Also has to be said that for someone not long active on the steam community side of things, the fact you guys have actual discussions about stuff is great. I like Steam.)

[Per Mertesacker]

Originally posted by Shattered Stone:

Making money on the market is a crapshoot really -- you can refresh the latest deals every second and try to catch people missing a 0 or selling way below marketplace, but you can't really make any money on the regular spread and depth of offers or corner the market as the steam fees dictate that 15% is eaten before you can even start to make a profit.

The other problem is that you will be competing against bots doing the exact same thing and being a lot quicker at buying out lowball offers; Steam does ban those people occasionally, but they're still there. You are at a disadvantage doing that.

Furthermore since there are no buy offers (ala EVE), you can't really try to get people to quick-sell to you either.

You could try to treat cards as investments (say, summer cards which will probably never drop again), but that's a long game and incredibly risky with games (as others have said, a single sale on a game can destroy your margin). You also do not know what Valve is going to do down the line -- when are the second series coming out? Are the first series still going to drop? Will they increase the booster rate? Will they reset drops at some point? Will they adjust marketability? Not predictable.

The only way to really make at some dependable profit is trading 1:2 like many do now; for every trade you make on average 10-15 cents if you are careful not to accept trades of incredibly cheap cards for your incredibly expensive (relatively speaking) cards. The rate at which you do that is pretty darn slow unless you operate automated trading bots like backpack.tf or steamcardexchange (the latter relies more on inter-game spreads to make a profit, while the former collects a guaranteed fee on every exchange even intra-game). Unless you are doing that, you are likely better off just playing Diablo 3 a lot and buying trading cards from RMAH profits -- and that's still a lot less money than flipping burgers and spending the money made there on cards. Plus you have to compete against people with more time and bigger team fortress 2 inventories from years of idling dozens of accounts who can just get all the cards for essentially nothing. (TF2 "removed" automated idling in tf2 at the start of the summer sale, though technically it is still possible and people still do it just now valve will probably start banning people from trade if they run dozens, hundreds, or thousands accounts doing that with automation).

You can have some fun with the market and the trading if you treat it as a game and never look at time spent per unit of profit. I wouldn't be surprised that you'd be better off working on Amazon Mechanical Turk (which pays absolute CRAP wages around $1 an hour) and spending that money on cards.

Yeah I thought the bots thing would be a big part of it, Fifa Ultimate Team (and Madden I assume) have this problem in a big way.

Still, the main idea of it is that I'll be around the marketplace looking to get my badges on the cheap, i might as well see if i can get a good stock of pennies up to do that with by capitalising when I see it.

[Shattered Stone]

Originally posted by TheRyanFace:

Yeah I thought the bots thing would be a big part of it, Fifa Ultimate Team (and Madden I assume) have this problem in a big way.

Still, the main idea of it is that I'll be around the marketplace looking to get my badges on the cheap, i might as well see if i can get a good stock of pennies up to do that with by capitalising when I see it.

You can find some nice deals, but you can't predict prices beyond today and certainly can't make more of a profit than working a regular job and spending even half of what you make there instead in the same time.

Then again, these are trading cards. Virtual trading cards.

[sin2099]

1.) isnt there a 15% transaction cost....so that's a HUGE dent into your profits (assuming any)
2.) isnt the item frozen for a week after purchase before you can resell? (generally the price you buy will be higher than the price you sell as a week later a lot more of the same item would floos the market...hence supply and demand)

[Azure Fang]

Originally posted by sin2099:

1.) isnt there a 15% transaction cost....so that's a HUGE dent into your profits (assuming any)
2.) isnt the item frozen for a week after purchase before you can resell? (generally the price you buy will be higher than the price you sell as a week later a lot more of the same item would floos the market...hence supply and demand)

This thread was over 2 years old. Thinks have changed since then. Great job reading before posting.

[W1NTERBORN]

1) 10% for cards... but yes, it reduces the profits quite a bit.
2) lol, the original thread was 2 yrs old, back then there was no waiting period for sales. (I think steam implemented that to prevent price gauging...)

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