Making money on GE (The Grand Exchange)

I was looking for a good guide on GE trading and/or speculation and found nothing. There are tips here and there, but not all of them are good and nothing was really worth studying. There is also a common sense approach: watch the prices, buy low and sell high in a week or so after the prices are up. That works, of course, I personally made 6 millions by doing just that with Santa Hats. But it is not where big money are. Then I suddenly realized that I might be an expert on GE speculation. After all I am making about 3 millions daily on GE spending 15-20 minutes of playing time...

But before I share with you my strategy, let's get a few things straight:

a) I know that many people consider speculation on GE (or on a stock market which is pretty much the same) unethical. I am NOT going to argue with it. If you feel that way, just stop reading this post and add me to you "lowly merchants" black list. I will only say, that risks are involved and research has to be made in order to be successful in this type of merchanting.

b) I am NOT going to disclose which items I am trading. Find yours! The thing is that if many people start trading the same item using this method, it might become more difficult to profit from it. But I can assure you that there are many good items out there to trade.

c) If you are indeed going to use my strategy and if you are successful in doing it, be ready for a change in your gameplay. It could be a problem, because there is a potential to make more money than you need and you may loose enjoyment of using your skills for "money making" schemes and activities. Now I am at the point when I can pretty much "buy skills" and I have to restrain myself from doing it in many cases. For instance, I don't want to buy Palm and Magic tree seeds for my Farming, though I could afford it now, or buy tons of Red Chinchompas for raising Ranged. Decide for yourself and be careful.

Also, please, understand that I wasn't a merchant before GE. Selling staff in pre-GE time was always a chore for me and I welcomed GE with both hands. For a while I was only selling my backlog of items there, then the prices went down and I made a few solid investments in cannonballs and pure essence. Both worked nicely and I suddenly got 20M in cash at the beginning on January. Then I did my Santa Hat and Green H'ween Mask trades, which added another 6.5M to the stack. But all that was normal "common sense" merchanting, which many of the players do. Finally at the end of January I started to research trading patterns on GE and experiment with short term trades, basically speculation. It worked, I am up to 140M and this is way more than I need...

All right, enough of history. Here is the strategy:
1. Look for items or commodities which are in "moderate" demand, meaning that they are needed by many players but not being sold instantly at the medium, low of high prices. That's the key.
2. Buy such items for either price slightly above the low or slightly above the medium price. It depends on an item and whether it is on a rise of fall at the moment. You'll have to do a research there, monitor the prices and use your common sense and see if some new game feature affects these items. "Slightly" means 1-10 gp for commodities and may go up to 1K-50K for other items. Note that your order will NOT be filled immediately! It is very important. You have to wait, sometime hours till it starts filling in. Sometime it never will, too bad - which could mean that the "slightly" was defined poorly or the item is not good for speculation.
3. Sell the items at the price slightly below the high or slightly below the medium price. The same as in #2.
4. After you find items you like, use bulk of your free cash to buy/sell a lot of them. Again "a lot" differs from item to item. It may be 10 or 100 or 200 or 100000. Really depends or the volume the item is trading on GE, which again you have to find by experimenting with it.
5. Find at least 6 such items and use all 6 slots for the trading. Watch out for price changes and repost your orders after one happens.
6. Be ready, that some of the items may become unprofitable over time, keep researching to have alternatives!
7. Don't expect to get the same profit margin from all items. You won't. For instance, the ones I use give me about 160K, 180K, 500K, 750K, 250K, 700K per buy/sell cycle. But my 500K+ ones work once a day, while 160K and 180K work several times a day.

So why does it work and why it is not a bug abuse? Well, because, the GE works perfectly well, what we are dealing with here is impatience of Runescape players. When an item does not sell, for medium or high price instantly, they often choose to sell it lower instead of waiting. So basically, the profit comes from taking this margin from impatient players.

That's pretty much it.
Good luck!