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Rules of RuneScape Change Cookie Settings. Forums Home Forums RuneScape Guides and Help Secrets of the Grand Exchange Search Users Code of Conduct. This guide will explain how the GE works "internally. This guide is written primarily to explain the workings of the Grand Exchange in RuneScape 3, but most of the concepts apply to the OSRS Grand Exchange as well.

I will not reveal any specific items here but the general principles underlying how the GE works should help anyone flip items at a profit. But this information is intended to help anyone who uses the Grand Exchange, including non-merchants. So, let's get started First I'm going to explain what the GE is not: Supply and demand for items are entirely determined by players.

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But how does the GE match buyers and sellers? It is helpful to think of the GE as a 'stack' of buy and sell offers, all being placed at the same time. I'm going to illustrate this visually with a hypothetical example. Suppose there are 2 people buying and 2 people selling rune 2h swords: Sell 40k Sell 38k Buy 36k Buy 34k At this point in time, nothing would happen.

The sellers are selling too high for their offers to get matched to anything. Now suppose a 5th player comes along and says "Grr, I want a rune 2h sword now. The GE will instantly pair up the offer with the lowest sell offer available -- 38K -- so he will get his sword and 62K back.

Thus, he got the best available deal at the time he placed the offer. Note that the buyer got the cash back here. This is because he placed the most recent offer.

Ok so our 'stack' of offers now looks like this: Can you guess what happens? Yup, the GE gives him the best possible offer at the time.

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This means that his offer will be matched with the highest buy offer 36K and he will get 36k cash for the sword. So now the stack is: Now let's return to original example. Here's the stack of Rune 2h offers: Sell 40k Sell 38k Buy 36k Buy 34k Suppose a different player puts in a buy offer 36k. Sell 40k Sell 38k Buy 36k, Buy 36k Buy 34k Now someone sells a sword for 30k again.

Who gets the sword? Most likely, the original 36k offer will be completed. This is because, in the event of an exact tie in price, the older offer is prioritized.

The level of priority given to an older offer is influenced by how much older the offer is. So offers placed around the same time at exactly the same price roughly take turns. However, given the number of offers in the GE, and the fact that most people sell these items on the street for higher prices, it may be years before some of the newer max cash offers fill.

Again, let's return to our original stack of R2h offers: Sell 40k Sell 38k Buy 36k Buy 34k In this case, the margin is 2k. The margin on any item is the difference between the lowest sell offer and the highest buy offer, at any given time. Very often, for relatively cheap items like r2h's, to discover the margins players will buy 1 rune 2h sword for a lot of money and resell very cheap. Here this will result in them buying for 38k and selling for 36k, revealing the margin.

I couldn't guarantee that buying at 36k flat gives me the best offer because the player to whom I sold the sword might be buying more than 1 in this case he's not, but we don't know meaning that his older offer would be prioritized over mine.

This is less effective for items limited at 2 or 1 limits discussed later or very expensive items, for which the test will be very costly or will only leave you with 1 item left to flip. For some of these it's best to check the prices using the FC's or forum threads in Item Discussion. These low limit items include level 90 gear, Nex gear, discontinued items, and third-age. Margins change as people place new offers. For example, there's nothing stopping another player from trying to sell his r2h at 37k flat.

This would decrease the margin is now decreased to 1k because the difference between the best sell and buy offers is now 1k. If you're familiar with real life stocks, margins are basically the difference between bid and ask prices.

Ok, well, again suppose we return to my original example for rune 2h swords. Sell 40k Sell 38k Buy 36k Buy 34k This item would probably be considered low volume if these were the only offers in place. This is because there are very few items being sold, and very few people buying.

What this means is that the margins can shift a lot if someone buys or sells one of the items. That's double the previous margin. Some items become increasingly low volume overnight US eastern standard time, since fewer people are online to buy and sell them.

This can be a good time to leave in some "lowball" offers -- snag these items very cheaply, and then resell them much higher later. You may have to wait a while to sell low volume items, even if your offer is the best one currently in the grand exchange. This means they are taken out of the stack of active offers, so they will no longer fill even if they represent the best offer currently in the GE.

When you log in again, these offers will reactivate but not sync with the current "stack" of GE offers. Therefore, if your offer represents the best one in the GE, you will slowly start buying items again--but the other player will receive any cash back if your sell offer is too low or your buy offer is too high.

Generally it's a good idea to cancel and replace inactive offers. The median price is calculated based on yesterday's buy and sell offers, and the item's 7 and 30 day price history.

The GE updates prices at a random time, once a day, no earlier than 3am and no later than 9pm BST. Yesterday's price may or may not accurately reflect the current value of the item.

For some low volume items, the med prices aren't updated every day because not enough of these items are traded. It's not quite clear exactly how many need to be traded in order for the med price to change.

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The guide prices of these items can be quite inaccurate. Examples include third-age items and discontinued rares. For many stable items and resources, the guide price works well. For recently released items, or items that are quickly rising or falling in price, the guide price may not accurately represent the street value. For most high value items, there are threads in the Item Discussion forum where you can ask about prices.

I'm not going to list these all out here because there's an excellent sticky in the Item Discussion forum about these. The limits are applied over a 4 hour period. It used to be that these limits were reset when you sold the items back, but this isn't true anymore. Now you must wait the full 4 for these limits to expire before buying more items.

If you place an offer larger than the limit in the GE, the offer will be essentially de-activated once you hit the limit, and then reactivated 4 hours later. Note that items with lower limits especially the ones limited at 2 or 1 often have larger margins because people just can't buy and sell very many. If you are a flipper, there are two other techniques you can use to flip items capped at 2 or 1. First, for non price-checkable items limited at 2 3rd age is a good example you can do this: Then buy 1 more way under that price guesstimate the margin and resell that one just under the instant buy price.

Or, alternatively, you can get the price from the forums or friends chats and guesstimate a reasonable margin. So for Santas, for example, I might leave in a buy offer k under their instant buy price, or K ish under the sell price.

If I don't get any for minutes, then increase the offer slightly and wait again. This way you'll "creep up" on the margin. Once they buy slowly, you can then resell higher. This works for items like bandos and armadyl too, which are limited to 1 currently. Reasonable margins for those are around k. And most importantly, why should you care if you aren't a flipper, but are a skiller or monster-slayer just looking to get the best prices for your loot?

Well I've already touched on how you can apply this knowledge to flip items in the above sections of the guide. If you're just looking to sell your hard-gained items at the best prices possible, though, here's my first suggestion: Well again, let's return to this rune 2h example.

Suppose you have 2 that you want to sell. Sell 40k Sell 38k Buy 36k Buy 34k Instant selling them would yield 70k. But instead, you can do this: Instant buy 1, then sell all of them just under that price. Now admittedly this example is somewhat contrived.

This is entirely possible if you just have a bit of patience. Well a similar piece of advice applies: To get the best deal, instant buy and instant sell 1 item to find out the margin. Then buy the rest of your items just above the instant sell price.

This can save you a lot if you are buying mass supplies. Also remember that botted items can drop a lot when those bots dump their supplies, so if you're using red chins, dhides, dragon bones, or the like, it won't hurt you at all to leave in a very cheap buy offer gp under instant sell price overnight. You might be surprised how much you save. That's all for now -- you can now post.