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OSRS Flipping: A Starter Guide

Let’s assume you’re an Old School Runescape player looking to improve your bank. You’ve heard trading on the Grand Exchange is a good way to make money, but where do you begin? Look no further - this guide will introduce you to the basic concepts and terminology around making Runescape gold through the GE.

What is Flipping?

There are two common terms you’ll hear around Runescape trading: merching and flipping.

Both terms are somewhat interchangeable, but generally, “flipping” is used to refer to short-term trading of items, with the intention of making a profit via buying an item at a low price and reselling it for a higher one. “Merching” is the practice of buying items on the expectation that their value will increase over the span of several days or longer.

Broadly speaking, flipping is more profitable than merching, while merching requires less time and attention. Most of this guide will be focused around flipping strategy, as flipping is the best way of making profit through trading on the Grand Exchange, and requires more sophisticated techniques than merching.

Why Flipping?

Simply put, flipping is the best money-making strategy in Old School Runescape. With a cash stack of ~1B gp on a single account, an experienced flipper can regularly earn 5-10M per hour during peak market hours (2:00PM - 10:00PM EST). This exceeds the profit rate for the majority of endgame bosses. Higher incomes are possible with larger cash stacks and multiple accounts.

Key Concept - Margins

The first concept to understand about flipping is how the Grand Exchange matches buyers and sellers. Buyers make bids on an item, which is a maximum price they’ll buy an item at. Sellers make asks, which is a minimum price they’re willing to sell the item for.*

When a buyer places a new bid greater than the lowest-priced existing ask from a seller, the Grand Exchange then executes a trade between those players at the price of the ask. Similarly, when a seller places a new ask lower than the highest-priced existing bid from a buyer, a trade goes through between those players at the price of the bid. The highest-priced buyers’ bid and the lowest-priced sellers’ ask are called the margins. The gap between them is called the spread, and measures the potential profit to be made by flipping an item (ignoring tax).

You can run a test to find these margins yourself, by placing a bid on an item high enough that you buy it instantly. This gives you the “sell price” of an item, meaning the threshold at which the item instantly sells. Then, take the same item, and sell it at a low enough price that it sells instantly to find the “buy price”. (Hint: if you get confused between “buy price” and “sell price”, add an “insta-” prefix to them in your head.) This process is called a price check. You’ll lose money by price-checking, but if you plan to trade a high volume of a particular item, running this test can serve as valuable reconnaissance. When trading expensive items, using a Grand Exchange market database tool like RuneCapital can save you the difficulty and cost of running price checks manually.

On occasion, you may discover brief windows where an item’s sell price is less than its buy price - meaning you can buy that item, and instantly resell it for a profit. This allegedly happens in cases where a player stays logged out for over 7 days with an unfilled sell order**. The order becomes inactive after the 7 day window, but when the player next logs in, their sell order can become reactivated without automatically matching to any since-placed buy orders. Take advantage of these opportunities when they happen!

On December 9, 2021, Jagex added a 1% sales tax to all major items traded on the Grand Exchange, up to a cap of 5M. This change has not had a major impact on the potential profits to be made through flipping, but does require some additional accounting work. To calculate your profit per flip on items that less than 500M, simply calculate the spread as before, then subtract the sell price divided by 100. For items over 500M, calculate your spread as before, then just subtract 5M.

    * "Bids" and "asks" aren't common terms in flipper parlance, but are useful for explaining how the GE operates.

    ** Credit to u/MacBigASuchNot: https://old.reddit.com/r/OSRSflipping/comments/s774qy//htalo78/

Key Concept - Market Price

When making a new bid or ask on the Grand Exchange, the game will set a default price for the player. This default is called the market price. This price updates roughly once a day.

Because many players rely on the default price when making new offers, the market price has huge implications for flipping. Absent any disruptive market forces, such as game update announcements and item dumps from botters, item prices tend to revert towards the market price due to players often placing orders at the default price value. For example, if the trading price of an item quickly dips below the market price, that item is more likely to increase in price over the next several hours - a smart flipper can take advantage of this trend by purchasing an item at its new low price and then leaving in an order to resell the item for just below market value.

How to Flip - Core Strategies

Large Cash Stack (500M+)

• HFT - Aim for quick flips on big ticket items such as Scythe and TBow - High risk, high reward
• Hedge Fund - Buy large quantities of midrange items that you consider high ROI or otherwise likely to increase in price soon - Medium risk, medium reward
• Big Game Hunter - Leave offers on big ticket items several M below the trading price to catch sudden fluctuations (note: this strategy relies on RuneCapital’s high-detail price plots) - Low risk, medium reward
• Specialist - Trade high-value, rare items such as 3rd Age gear - Unknown

Medium Cash Stack (100M - 500M)

• Index Fund - Start turning over small stacks of items in the 5-100M price range.
• Four Hour Flips++ - Same as below, but add air battlestaves and phase out lower profit options.

Small Stack (20M - 100M)

• Money Mover - Start turning over small stacks of items in the 100k-20M price range. This stage of gameplay has the greatest range of possible options; any item with >10M gp of value bought and sold per day can be a viable candidate.
• Four Hour Flips - Aim to quickly flip the buy limit of common high-volume commodities such as Zulrah’s Scales, Blood Runes, and Prayer Potions every four hours.

Starter Stack (<20M)

• Newbie Investor - Play around with flipping in any style you like, but don’t rely on it as your primary income.
• Bond Purchaser
• Runescape Player - Earn gold by playing the game. If you’re looking to get bootstrapped quickly, check out https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/Optimal_quest_guide.

How to Flip - Item Choice

As of the time of writing, the Grand Exchange contains 3826 unique items. The majority of them are not frequently traded, and thus not useful for flipping. The potential profit to be made on an item is more or less proportional to the total gp value of that item bought and sold on a daily basis.

To give you a starting reference, a snapshot of the top 400 items as of 2022-05-14 is included below, ranked relative to transaction volume. Players in the "Large Stack" range should focus on the top 100 items, players in the "Medium Stack" range should focus on the top 200 items, and players in the "Small Stack" range can pick anything in the top 400. To be clear, these rankings are a guideline, and far from a true reflection of an items' flipping quality. Experiment to see what works for you!

Toggle Item Table

Other Resources

Ready to start flipping, but not ready to invest in a premium tool? No problem! Check out these other great resources for OSRS flipping and data:

• https://github.com/Flipping-Utilities/rl-plugin
• https://prices.runescape.wiki/osrs/
• https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/RuneScape:Real-time_Prices
• https://www.osrsbox.com/

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