Ms Santa's Pre Limit Update Manipulation Guide

by **Ms. Santa** 1/5/2012, 11:28 pm

Manipulation: An Overview

What is manipulation?
Manipulation is a 3-step process used to heavily increase the price of an item.

What are the three steps?
The three steps are as follows:
• Stocking
• Manipulating (Rising)
• Dumping

Pre-Manipulation:
What is it that you have to do BEFORE you start a manipulation? Obviously, you have to find an item to manipulate. Well first let’s look at the factors of a good item to manipulate:
• The graph should look almost like an investment graph. If you want to manipulate an item, why not also bandwagon it, and make it easier to rise?
• The item should have a limit of under <100. If it has a higher limit, which means the stock of the item is higher, meaning you need more money. I would stay away from items with a limit of two, as the stocking phase proves to be rather difficult unless you have multiple accounts or have a large group. With those factors it proves to be very profitable with an item with a very low limit.
• The item should have a demand, even at the raised price. Pk items/barrows items are great for manipulating, for the exact reason that people will buy them at whatever price.
• While it should have a demand, it should not have too high of a supply, unless you have a extraordinary amount of money to put into a manipulation. This rule tends to be followed for solos/duos for people of <1b wealth.

Phase 1: Stocking
During this phase, you want to aim to get ~70-80% of your total stock that you want by the end of the merch. Obviously if you are doing method two during phase two (read below) you can lower this aim. When you are stocking, you do not want people to catch on that this is an item you are manipulating. This phase is not for raising the price. REPEAT. This phase is not for raising the price. When you buy your item, do not instant buy, and buy for med or less than. If you buy for higher, the price will rise, and you will be cutting your own profit, and allow people to jump on the bandwagon for your item. This phase is the easiest of the three, and requires the least work. It tends to take ~2-4 days, depending on how much you want to buy and what the limit of the item is.

Phase 2: Manipulation

This method tends to be reserved for people with less money, and don’t have the straight up cash available to mass buy an item to make it rise. This method works just as well, and gives you the same profit. It’s just a bit more tedious.

How does this method work? Well it’s just as it sounds. You buy while you flip the item in question. Let’s say the limit is 100. You would constantly flip the item, and it a group manip, you would not undercut anybody else. First you buy 100, instead of selling 100 back, you would sell 98 back. You would repeat this until you either can’t afford any more or have finished the limit. I would suggest you stop at half the limit, and either have someone else buy you a limit to go on top of that with, or just constantly flip them. If the price is above med and you are flipping it, this will make it rise.

It it critical for there to ALWAYS be buy and sell offers in the ge. You already have a fair portion of the market, and you do not want to lose control of it. If the price tends to slip under, buy the limit instant, yes instant, and sell for 1gp more per. It will sell as the stock is so little. You can do this multiple times, but this inflated price won’t last long unless you are avidly updating buy and sell offers, and don’t have an “empty space” so to speak.

Also, remember to have lower margins. For this type of manipulation it is critical that you do have very little margins. When you see a tiny margin on this item, don’t undercut it (for 2+ people manip). It is to keep others away from flipping the item, and will make your flips go lightning fast. Remember that this stage is not for profit, just for raising the item. That is why you bought most of the item at the lower price in Phase 1.

Sometimes, you can manage to have higher margins and make alot of money this way. Lets say you are using a very uncommon item. Then there are less flippers and therefore allowing you to have a higher margin. With this higher margin and your high stock you can have so much control over the item that you can most of them time control the prices and make alot more on the flipping than the actual manipulation.

For this phase it also proves profitable to use the queue system to your benefit. Well, what is this system? This is how the GE works. When you place an offer, lets say for this case at the same price as the sell price (low price), you will get the item at the same time as the other person but in spikes. They get 10, you get 10, and so on. But when you undercut, you get it first because you have the highest offer for the item. But what happens when you use the same price and use the more slots? You count as more than one person. If you use 4 spots for buying you will count as 4 different people. The same goes for selling an item. This is why using all of your slots is always beneficial to you, as you want as much to happen as possible.

Phase 3: Dumping

Dumping as you already may know is not the sudden sell of all your items. It’s not even the sale of the item in increments. Eg. 10 instant sold every hour. It is the slow sell of an item, in a way that the market will not realize that there is more of an item coming into the market.

You will dump your item with the method: flip while selling. In the last phase, you flipped while buying, but this time you are going to do it as follows. Let’s say you have a total of 200 (insert item name here). Let us also say that the limit of said item is 10. You will start flipping with one limit, and slowly increase the limits you flip with. Once you are flipping with your total stock you will do this. Buy 150 of the item, sell 153. Do this till you only have 150 of the item. Then buy 100, sell 105. Do this till you only have 100 of the item. You will continue to do this method until you are finished with your stock or have a significantly low amount. Dumping will take roughly 1-2 days, but you want to try to get it done in one day, so it doesn’t crash prices to fast.

The prices at which you want to dump very much depends on the item. By this I mean the margins, whether you are flipping with 1gp margins, or much higher ones. In alot of instances crashing items prove to have one of the highest margins, but if it is crashing to fast you wont be able to sell all of your stock before you end up losing money. Alot of times you should try to take advantage of those higher margins as you can make ALOT on them.