You ever stroll into the RavenQuest marketplace, see some guy flexing a 1000-item inventory, and think "Damn the guy sure cut down a lot of trees!".
Or see pages and pages of single item listings and think: "Damn a lot of people are only cutting down one tree!"
Well friend, these people are not actually cutting down trees, they are playing market arbitrage. I'm going to outline why they do it, how they do it, and just what kind of terrible person it takes to do what they do the way do it. So that you can too.
Source: KlingAI
Those cats are doing what every seasoned Path of Exile trader, World of Warcraft goblin, and EVE Online tycoon figured out ages ago: buy cheap, sell to people who value time more than clicks. Once high-level players settle on strategies that maximize their silver, divs or dollars per hour, they don’t want to waste time hunting and pecking for cheap listings.
And that’s where lowbies and Hideout Heroes get a chance to carve out a slice. When the whales are too busy running spreadsheets or grinding optimized routes to bend over for scattered coins, we can scoop up what they’re ignoring and flip it right back into their hands. It’s not glamorous, but it works.
I’m going to walk you through a couple different strategies you'll see, and then we’ll get to the real game: how to pick your item and set your price threshold, because that’s where the magic (and the profits) live.
The Poach is where a player buys up all the multi-unit listings of an item under a certain price threshold, but leaves one or two copies sitting there for each entry to hold the price. So if there's a listing for 43 small logs for 40, they'll only buy 42 and leave one behind at the 40 price point. Rinse and repeat from the lowest price up to your threshold, say 45 in this case. Those singles ensure that the first page of the listings a player sees when they go to sell their item are at a lower price than you think you can get for selling the item in bulk. So people will constantly list small batches for 40 that you resell for 44 or 45.
Savvy players will of course scan ahead for the actual price of the item, so this really works best for high volume items that are accessible to all players, or for items that are relatively low cost. A player with 5 logs worth 40 each doesn't really care if they could have sold them for 44 - they're only missing out on 20 silver. On the other hand if an arbitrage trader buys 1000 logs at 40 from many different players and sells them for 44, that's 4000 silver.
If they sell them for 45, that's 5000.
And of course, you're not buying 1000 at 40, you're actually buying 400 at 40, 200 at 38, 200 at 36 and so on.
The downside here of course is that you have to sit there on that single item page refreshing so that you can snap up the sell offers as soon as they are posted.
Now the Rollup is the opposite end of the pool. Here, you’re not waiting at all. You’re imposing your will on the market. You pick the price you want to sell at, and you buy everything below that number, then list it for the new price. You lose out on potential poachables by immediately raising the floor, but you don't have to sit around at all and can just instantly move to the next item once you've listed.
You just click the first one, then the next until you've cleared the first couple pages, then drop your 100 stacks.
Personally, I like a hybrid approach. I start with a Poach—buying all but one of each item up to my threshold—then I shift gears and begin rolling up by aggressively buying the ninth listing slot.
Why the ninth? RavenQuest’s sell screen shows the prices of the cheapest four items, and page two shows slots five through eight. But the market’s main screen shows slot nine. So by buying up that ninth slot repeatedly, I can gradually roll the price upward while keeping the first two browsable pages from the sell screen at the lowest prices. I get all the benefits of the Poach along the way, letting me snipe deals during my rollup cycle.
Source: KlingAI
All of that hinges on one thing: picking the right item. This is where most people mess up, because picking an item is hard. You can’t just grab the first thing you see and expect it to turn into silver overnight.
Last week, it was Fine Logs. At the time, I could comfortably sell them for 53 silver each, and listings were popping up all the way down to 28. That’s a spread with serious room to move. People are constantly getting one or two or ten Fine Logs from bounty board quests, so there’s a steady flow of supply and constant volatility. I ran that little racket for maybe three days before someone else caught wind of it and moved in. They fluctuate between 98 and 105 right now, so I don't even look at 'em.
The week before that, it was Coal. Same story—steady inflow from casual players, good spread, easy to flip fast. But here’s the reality: no niche stays secret forever. Someone will always find the same opportunity eventually—you just have to get there first and milk it while it’s good. Coal is 20 now, I was trading it between 25 and 50.
You can only realistically keep 5 or 6 of these hot items in your head at any given time as a rotation. No one wants to spend their whole session playing Hideout Hero. Having a tight little rota is nice for when you come back from questing, or fishing, or mining and want to offload quick or top up your stockpile before logging out.
Before diving in, though, you need to answer two key questions: what is a good item, and what does it actually look like on the listings?
Start with this: market fees are 4% right off the top. Easy math says we use 10% as a safe rule of thumb to cover fees and have room for some gravy. If you can buy a stack of items at 40 silver each, you’ll break even around 42. At 44, you’re making about 6% profit. Personally, I use 10% as my safety buffer to gauge the highest price I’m willing to pay. If I see an item where I can comfortably buy batches at 40 and know I can sell at 44 or higher, I’m in business.
Ideally, the listing looks something like this: a fat stack of 100 at 40 silver, maybe one stray at 41, another lonely one at 42, nothing at 43, and a scatter of singles and 5-packs below 40. That’s your gravy. That’s where the real margin lives. But here’s the key, you have to mentally set both your buy threshold and your sell threshold before you make a single move. Once you start buying, you need to know exactly how high you’re willing to pay and exactly where you plan to cash out. Otherwise, you’re flying blind and burning silver for nothing.
Source: KlingAI
Anyway, good luck and be wary. I once got stuck holding 71 pieces of Cargo Netting I had priced at 9,999 each. I rolled up too hard and the market just couldn’t bear it. I lost that round eventually selling them around the 5500 mark (having paid 7k+ each). and learned the lesson that people who want to bulk buy Cargo Netting don't need a thousand, they need exactly 25 for the craft it's used on. But hey, my other flips easily made up for it - there’s a reason I’ve got top gear at a low-ish level with no crafting skills to speak of. And its name is arbitrage.
