Intro

I’m going to talk about flipping in OSRS, partially because I’m bored, but also because it’s probably one of the biggest reasons I ended up in crypto today.

I first started playing Runescape at a time period later than most, around 2010. I played it on and off through the years, but in early 2021 I discovered exactly how profitable flipping was in OSRS. For a period of around 2-3 months in spring 2021, I traded for anywhere between 4-8 hours a day on the Grand Exchange. During this time period, I racked up ~200m in profit trading on OSRS, which some would argue is not a lot. But the thing is, I did it from scratch.

I started out flipping free to play items, took my profit and turned that into a bond which was redeemable for 2 weeks of membership, and then started trading member’s items after that. (This was actually the first time in my life that I was a member on Runescape, I had never once bought membership before.)

During that time period, I was frequently on the first page of the weekly/monthly PNL leaderboards for the tracker I used. And despite not touching my OSRS trading account for close to a year now, it’s still ranked in the top 500 PNL all time for GE Tracker. Personally, I think I was pretty successful and am happy with my results from that time period.

The period of time I traded the most was pre-GE tax, a 1% tax charged to sellers on all items they sell. Personally I’m a fan of a change since it’s healthier for the OSRS economy, but this does affect some of the strategies I talk about, but I’ll go into more detail later. Also anyone who trades in OSRS knows this, but for those who don’t there’s a buy limit that resets every 4 hours on the Grand Exchange. It essentially limits how much volume you can push for an item, which can be mitigated if you want to open up more accounts, but I never bothered.

Useful Tools

Flipping Utilities (Super handy RuneLite plugin to track PnL in game.)

Price checker for all items (Tends to lag anywhere from 1-5 min behind, but still very useful, do a margin check by putting in a high bid to market buy and then instantly sell an item at 1gp to accurately see what the live spread is. There is profitable alpha in being able to find the live spread (or setting it yourself) to front run the site. Any item with a ROI below 1% means that post-tax you lose money trading it at the current spread.)

GE Tracker (You can track prices here too, not sure how accurate they are in comparison to the above link though. What I actually used it for was to export data from the Flipping Utilities plugin into somewhere I could visualize performance over time better.)

Strategies/Categories

High Volume

The first strategy was focusing on high volume items that see a lot of consumption but also have decent spreads. This tends to be consumables, so for F2P that would be things like steel/mith/addy/rune ores/bars, F2P non-elemental runes, gems, etc. For P2P this list is a lot longer, but includes things like potions (sara brews, prayer pots, anti-venom+, etc.), planks, ranged ammo (chins/darts/enchanted bolts), and dragonhide.

Generally these items will have buy limits in the range of thousands. This essentially allows you to settle for small profit per item, since you’ll be trading thousands of them at once.

The GE tax did hurt this strategy however, with P2P high volume items being slightly affected, and F2P items being hit a lot harder. For example, law runes are currently buying at 125 gp and selling for 126, so they have a spread of 1gp. Pre-tax, with a 4h buy limit of 18k, this means you could buy 18k law runes and sell them for a 1gp profit each, and come out ahead by 18k. Post-tax, a 1gp profit on a 125gp law rune means you lose money, since the ROI is 0.8% and the tax is 1%. The same story tends to repeat itself for a lot of these higher volume F2P items, which is why F2P traders got hit a little harder. For P2P items I find that the spreads tend to be a little wider, and since P2P items are more expensive, a 1gp difference in spread tends to mean a lot less.

Two of my favorite items to do using this strategy were Saradomin Brew(4) and Prayer potion (4). Since these are heavily used consumables, players tend to just market buy and execute any price. My bids also tend to fill really fast for them as well. I’ve seen spreads as high as 2-3%, which can get as high as ~200k profit post-tax for each of these items with extremely quick turnaround (<30 min). If you can’t afford the ~20m for a full 2k buy limit in one go, just split it into smaller batches.

Some items in this category were a little bit more inconsistent, such as dragon darts or chins. Every now and then the spread would open up wide enough that I would be able to offload a full buy limit for 200-400k profit, which was fun. But more often the spread would be too small and the amount of time it would take to fill my bid meant that my money was better spent flipping something else. A F2P item that falls under this category would be gold ore, especially pre-tax. Sometimes for god knows what, the spread on gold ore just opens up a stupid amount, maybe as high as 5%. But the thing is, gold ore has a buy limit of 30k, whereas pots are capped at 2k and darts/chins at 11k. As a result, I would be able to make 250k+ flipping gold ore, which is a lot for F2P.

Dragonhide theoretically should work with this strategy, but I found getting fills for it an incredible pain in the ass, my bids were constantly getting buried by higher bids. Herbs and some pots were also a pain in the ass for the above reason, but also because the bid demand for some of these items is very high, while sell volume can be very low, which makes both filling your bids and selling what you bought very difficult.

For this strategy you need to be making sure that someone isn’t outbidding you and taking your fill, so if you’re seeing a steady stream of buys for your item and that suddenly stops, someone probably has an order above you with a higher bid. I like to throw on an extra 3gp onto whole number bids for this reason. So if the active bid for an item is 94,000, I’d bid 100,003(psychopath bid), which would front run any 100,000 (normal person), 100,001(smart person), and 100,002(smarter person) bids.

You can see how F2P got hurt more here, this is an old screenshot with 2m profit with an avg ROI of 0.63%, aka post-tax this isn’t possible anymore.

Things with Decent Volume

I don’t really know how to describe this category of items, but essentially these items likely don’t have high buy limits of 10k and they probably don’t do more than 100k items traded per day in volume, most of them probably don’t even do 5k.

I’ll just list some examples of some items I really liked trading that fall under this weird category.

Without a doubt, one of my favorite items here is the abyssal whip. It has a buy limit of 70 and typically is relatively stable in price, as you can see from this 1 day chart I pulled while writing this. Right before 0:00, between 3:00 and 6:00, and before 9:00 you can see people with active bid floors on this item. If you can find where those bid floors are, you can outbid by 1gp, get filled, and sell the spread. If you’re a little bit more patient you can just be the floor instead, and I find that filling for abby whips to be not too bad.

Just in this example alone you can see the potential profit, which multiplies buy limit and spread together, to give you a 1.6m number. After factoring in tax, you can make 400k in 4 hours in this example. If you’re more patient or don’t have the time to actively trade that much, you can see that prices tend to fall below 1,670,000 somewhat frequently, and exceed 1,700,00 relatively often. If you bid and sell at those numbers, you would have a 1.76% ROI, subtract 1% for the tax, and you’re making close to 13k/whip, and over 900k for a full buy limit of 70.

Another item(s) I really liked were the god dhide sets. I pretty frequently would set bids for these before going to bed, then wake up and flip whatever had filled for as high as 1m profit.

I also did Dagon’hai pieces, godswords, and crystal seeds; I would classify those under this category.

Low Volume

Some of the items I traded would do less than 10 items a day in volume. That doesn’t mean they aren’t profitable, it just means that they aren’t liquid. These typically tend to be cosmetic items.

To look for items like these I would sort set a price filter of 1m-100m, then sort by margin to see which had the largest spreads, and then bid those.

This method is better the more money that you have, since many of the most expensive items see little volume, which means that big spreads open up more often. Once you get to items that over 1b, a 50m margin can mean that you can walk away with 40m in profit. Buy limits for these tend to be in the single digits, usually 4 or 8, but buy limits don’t actually restrict you since there’s just so little volume for these kinds of items. These trades will be obviously be much slower, but the payoff can be huge.

I find for trades like these, it becomes less about quick execution and more of a psychology game of balancing how high should you bid to ensure that you are the one who gets the buy, while not overpaying too much, which cuts into your profit.

Conclusion

These strategies probably work best in the 0-100m range, after a certain point I think it’s more worth your time to just do low volume expensive items, high volume takes too much attention/time.

I had a lot of fun doing this for that period of time, and it helped me learn a lot about markets, supply and demand, etc. I got more into crypto as time went on and it became a chore spending so much time looking at item prices on OSRS, especially since I felt like I had learned about all I could and the OSRS gold I earned so much of wasn’t actually worth much, so I just wasn’t getting much out of it anymore. It was fun while it lasted!