Flipping 101: Part 1 - What Is Flipping?
Introduction
This flipping guide will start quite basic and then slowly progress into more and more advanced techniques and hopefully I will cover stuff you hadn't heard of. This guide will presume you have no prior knowledge of how flipping works. If you ever need any help or realise any mistakes in the guide feel free to join the Runeguru Clan chat and contact me personally about your queries or suggestions. This guide will be split in a few sections, this section revolves around explaining the principle of flipping.
What is flipping?
Flipping basically consists of buying products for cheap and then selling them for a higher price. There are various types of flips and I will be going through the two main types below.
Short flipping
Short flips consist of buying and selling the product quite quickly, these are usually less risky as the price of the product is less likely to change extremely within the span of a few minutes to hours although it does happen sometimes, the profits on short flips aren't great when compared to their long flip counterparts and you will often have to flip several items at once to make big bucks on this method. Short flipping relies on you flipping several items quickly with small margins to accumulate a big profit.
Long flipping
Long flips involve following trends and purchasing/hoarding products that you believe will increase in price in the future and flipping them when it occurs. A good example of this would be when the wintertodt mini-game's drops were recently nerfed. As the drops were nerfed the items which were dropped by wintertodt rose in price, people who predicted the nerfed occuring due to the overpowered drops of wintertodt purchased a decent stock of certain items dropped by wintertodt such as a ranarr seed. As you can see from the graphs below the price of ranarr seeds jumped hugely straight after the wintertodt was nerfed. Long term flipping relies on you flipping a few big ticket items that you believe will rise in price in the future.
As you can see just before the nerf Ranarr seeds were trading at roughly 15k, this was due to the fact that the drop was very common in the Wintertodt minigame and prices were falling rapidly for the product.
And also as you can see here shortly after the nerf to the drop table for Wintertodt Ranarr seeds were trading actively at 22.6k, that is an increase of roughly 50% in three days. This is because before the release of Wintertodt the price of Ranarrs seeds was significantly, usually ranging from 30k to 35k and the nerf to drop meant they were returning closer to pre-wintertodt prices.
Obviously you can see from above that anyone who had predicted the nerf could have made potentially 50% profit on the cash they invested. Ranarrs are currently still rising and at the time of this guide they're actively trading for 26k.
The more common form of flipping is short term flipping and that is what the bulk of my guide will be based. This is because I'm more experienced in this situation as opposed to long term flipping. Long term flipping requires a lot of knowledge about Runescape which I probably wouldn't be able to teach within one guide. And even successful long term flippers incorporate short term flipping in their daily routine as it makes more money quicker.
Please read part 2 for information on how to flip
