Old School RuneScape – Grand Exchange Explaining Guide

This guide is meant to explain to new and old about the Grand Exchange. “Where is it? What is it? How can it be used to make my 1gp into a max cash stack?” I’ll do my best to answer these questions and more.

Guide to Grand Exchange

Please note: all credit goes to Athrek!

Where and What Is the Grand Exchange?

The Grand Exchange is just Northwest of Varrock, far north of where the player begins in Lumbridge. It is a trading hub where players can buy or sell goods with other players without direct contact, much like Auction Houses in other games. There are a few key difference between the Grand Exchange and an Auction House that I will explain shortly. In addition to trading goods, players can also bank, exchange specific items for a set-box(allowing for easier buying, selling, and storage of multiple goods at once) and interact with a few NPCs in the area who can tell you current prices of some items and perform certain services for you such as “decanting”. For members there are also quite a few shortcuts located at the Grand Exchange so it is a place members will find themselves using often.

What Makes the Grand Exchange Different from an Auction House?

There are several things that are different from the Auction Houses found in other games and these differences are what make the Grand Exchange so amazing. The first and most important difference is that the Grand Exchange has NO TAXES OR FEES. None. What this means is that you can buy an item for 1gp and sell it for 2 gp and actually make a profit. This creates an entire money making method on it’s own that players can use to get rich.

Secondly, rather than all the current items up for grabs being visible and searchable, players have to search for the specific item they want and set a price they are willing to buy it at while sellers set prices they are willing to sell at. What this means is that if a player puts up an item for 30gp, and another player offers to buy it for 29gp, then the buyer won’t buy and the seller won’t sell so the item and the buy offer will sit in the Grand Exchange. Alternatively, if the seller placed the item up for 30gp and the buyer had offered 1000gp, then the buyer will buy the item for 30gp and get refunded the other 970gp while the seller will receive the 30gp he asked for the item. But if on the other hand the buyer had offered 1000gp for that item and no one had offered to sell it yet, when the seller puts the item up for 30gp they will receive 1000gp while the buyer gets the item. So be careful before you offer ridiculous prices for items, if no one has any up for sale then you may just end up overpaying for an item.

Third is buy limits. You can sell as much of anything as you like but you can only purchase a set amount of a specific item every 4 hours. So if an items buy limit is 1000, you can buy 1000 of that item every 4 hours for a total of 6000 of that item every day. A way to make sure you get that 6000 is to put an offer up to purchase 6000 and it will automatically be filled every 4 hours so long as people are selling at or below the price you offered to buy it at. Note that when the timer resets and allows you to buy again after hitting the buy limit, it will purchase the cheapest available items first for their set price. So you won’t overpay on items as long as they are already being sold for a cheaper price when your limit resets. This system is good because it keeps rich players from influencing the market on everyday items and most expensive items as well. If you need more of an item than a buy limit allows, you can often ask another player to buy it for you, though they may request a fee.

Finally you are only allowed to have a set amount of trade offers at a time. So F2P can buy and/or sell only 3 things at a time, meanwhile P2P can trade 8 things at a time. This gives members a distinct advantage when they are trying to “flip” items but I’ll get more into that in a little bit.

How Can the Grand Exchange Be Used to Turn 1gp Into a Max Cash Stack?

This question has a simple answer. Buy low and sell high! OSRS has been around for a long time and there is such a wide variety of items needed that players need for quests or tasks and they have so much money that they don’t care about wasting an extra million gp here or there as long as they can get what they want. With the lack of any taxes or fees, this means players willing to wait on items can offer to buy items for cheaper than they are currently selling for, then sell them at their current selling price for a profit. This profit may be 1gp, or 10, or 10million. It all depends on how patient you or and what the market on a particular item is like at any time. This method is called Flipping. Now while the answer may be simple and most of the work will be up to the individual to figure out, I’ll give a few tips on how to go about it that may help.

  1. At 1gp you can buy a hammer or something from the general store and sell it for like 70 gold. EZ money (I did promise from 1gp after all).
  2. When you have more than 1 gp, preferably a few thousand(you can get 10k from Stronghold of Security to get a better start) then look for items to flip. The best when starting out is to pick simple and cheap items with high buy limits an low margins(the difference in price between buying and selling). Items that fall into this category are things like logs, ores, bars, bones, runes, food, raw fish and meats, arrows, and pretty much anything that people need a lot of for skilling purposes. These items are usually bought and sold quickly and with their high buy limits, even if you only make 1gp at a time you will be able to make more than 10k gp per item. To figure out the prices for these items, buy 1 for whatever it is being sold for, raising the price until you inta-buy it, then sell it for as low as it takes to instantly sell it, then buy at the insta-sell price before selling at the insta-buy price.
  3. Once you’ve gotten this down, you can try flipping more expensive items with lower buy limits. Things like axes, pickaxes, weapons, armor, jewelry and potions. These items buy and sell more slowly, but still fairly fast especially when you consider that you only need 70 compared to 11000 of any one item with them. In addition the higher profit margins generally mean that you’re usually making the same amount of money or more from them. For these items, I’d recommend starting on them when you have 100k-200k gp.
  4. Now that you have more money you can start mixing slow flips with quick flips. Quick flips is what you been doing and is pretty much items that get bought and sold soon after the offer is put up. Slow flips are WAAAY more profitable but will tie your gp up for long periods of time, possibly indefinitely. Slow flipping is inconsistent but highly profitable for the time spent with the ability to make you rich overnight if you get lucky. Items that are generally considered slow flips are things like cosmetic items from clue scrolls. The prices for this vary extremely so they can be done at almost any amount of money. To slow flip effectively, you generally don’t want to “price check” since it can cost you a lot of money to find out the price difference and then you may not even make back what you sold it for. In these cases, use a website that tracks prices to find approximate value for the item. Put a low price that you think you can buy the item for and leave the offer to buy it whenever you aren’t actively trading. If you don’t get one, try buying a little higher the next time you put the offer up. If you do get one, then sell for as high as you think you can get until it sells, lowering the price every day or so until someone buys it.
  5. The next step is the even more expensive stuff with even lower buy limits. Usually this stuff is mid game meta equipment that people don’t need to replace very often and that rich players could easily influence if the buy limits were higher. You should have at least 1mil before starting on this stuff.
  6. Near End Game Meta stuff. Not the end-end game but more like the “I’m finally starting to kill bosses, but not the hard ones and not super efficiently” part of the game. For this stuff, I recommend having at least 10mil and up to 50mil
  7. Efficient Bossing Meta. Just 1 more step above, flipping this stuff will require you to have anywhere from 50mil to 200mil to flip effectively.
  8. End Game. You are getting near that max cash stack, if you need me to tell you what to flip here then I have no idea how you got here. Prolly need 500mil to 1bil to flip here.

Putting It All Together

So now that you have all this information, I’ll try to turn it into a simple set of instruction on what a normal session of flipping will look like.

Log on and check your slow flips that you set up before logging out. If you managed to buy anything the night before, put it up for sale, otherwise take your slow flips down and start about 4 items that are a bit slower such as equipment by price checking them then setting up an offer to buy as many as your buy limit allows. While waiting for those to buy, price check your quick flips and start buying and selling those 2 items at a time until your buy limits run out. Pause your quick flips whenever you get any of your slower flip items and start selling them since they will take a little bit. Do this til you’ve either done every item you can think of or it’s time to log off. Set up buy offers for slow flips in all your spaces so that you have a higher chance of getting one. Repeat as desired.

Volodymyr Azimoff
About Volodymyr Azimoff 15051 Articles
I love games and I live games. Video games are my passion, my hobby and my job. My experience with games started back in 1994 with the Metal Mutant game on ZX Spectrum computer. And since then, I’ve been playing on anything from consoles, to mobile devices.

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