Grand Exchange flipping list and how to use it

How flipping works

On any busy item there are two prices at once: what impatient buyers are paying and what impatient sellers are accepting. Flipping means placing a buy offer near the lower one, waiting for it to fill, then selling near the higher one. You are paid for patience and for holding the item for a while.

Buying low and selling high on the GE is allowed. Using software that places offers for you is not. Be wary of groups that ask you to buy into a coordinated price rise: the people who organise them sell first, and late buyers are left holding the item.

The tax maths

The Grand Exchange takes 2% of every sale, rounded down and capped at 5 million coins per item. Buy something at 1,000 and sell it at 1,050, and the tax is 21 coins, leaving 29 profit. Any flip needs a gap wider than 2% of the sale price just to break even. Two useful exceptions: items sold for under 50 coins pay no tax at all, and Old School bonds are exempt. The margin column on this page already has the tax taken off.

Margin, volume and limit together

Your profit over a four-hour window is the margin times however many you can buy, and the buy limit caps that. A tiny margin on a big limit can beat a big margin on a small one. The examples below are illustrations, not today's numbers:

Those totals assume every unit fills at both ends. Volume tells you how likely that is. An item that trades millions of units a day fills in minutes; one that trades a few dozen may sit for hours, and by the time it fills the margin may have closed. As a rule of thumb, look for daily volume many times larger than the quantity you want to buy.

Placing offers

• Spread your slots. Members have 8 offer slots, free-to-play accounts have 3. One expensive item in every slot is one bad update away from a loss across your whole bank.
• Price inside the spread. Buying a coin or two above the instant sell price, and selling a coin or two under the instant buy price, gets you filled ahead of others at a slightly thinner margin.
• Know when to cut. If a buy has filled and the price has dropped below what you paid, decide on a limit in advance. Selling at a small loss beats waiting a week for a price that never comes back.
• Use the history. Open an item's page from the list to see its 7-day and 30-day chart. A margin that only exists because the price is crashing is not a margin.

When flips go wrong

The biggest risk is news. A game update that changes a drop rate, adds a better item or nerfs a method can move prices by a lot in minutes, so many flippers keep their slots light on update days. Raw materials such as logs, fish and ores also get steady supply from players and bots gathering them, so they can drift down while you hold them.

Flipping versus other ways to make gold

Flipping pays best when you have a large bank and little time to play, since offers fill while you do other things. With a small bank, active methods from the money making list usually earn more per hour. Some flippers also check the high alch list: an item that dips below its alch value plus a nature rune has a safe floor, because it can always be alched. The full Grand Exchange price list has every item if you want to sort the market your own way.