You want to go for items that have a relatively stable market price, especially with lower tier trading. Stuff like bet skins, doppler knives etc

The problem is that when you're doing nothing to a knife and you're working with 10 cents of profit, if that, it's very hard to find items that dont fluctuate at all.

That's the unfortunate reality of trading low tier and why it is so difficult to progress.

Kato 14 isn't really my strength but as far as I know, for less desirable skins such as a blue lam, you add about 5% of the sticker value. So for this I'd try to get 5-6 keys or so.

As I said, not a kato expert so this might not be 100% accurate

There is less demand for ST items and because of that, such items are more difficult to sell. This is especially the case with shitty knives such as Stained, Urban masked etc where the demand is practically non-existent. For this reason, people try to avoid such items because it's a waste of their time to try to sell it.

However, ST versions of gun skins aren't that hard to sell, for example ST Vulcans are pretty easy to sell.

So in short, until you've reached the level of trading where you can gauge how hard each ST knife is, it's a good idea to just avoid them

I think you could squeeze out like 2 keys for it, if that

Today I will be covering the crucial topic of networking as a trader.

In order to take advantage of principals that real world businessmen have been utilizing for decades, it is important to realize that trading IS a business. No matter if your goal is making some money to build a new PC or trading up to your dream inventory, viewing trading as a business opportunity will give you an advantage over most traders.

There are no mystical forces at play when trading. There is luck involved, sure, but the point I will be attempting to make with this and other future write-ups is that by looking at trading from an empirical point of view, with every occurrence having a cause, you will be able to detect and understand trends and behavior within the community that you can take advantage of to further your goals, whatever they might be.

Like with real-world business, who you know is often far more important than what you know and in this case WHO you know will actually improve WHAT you know. In the context of trading, this means building up your friends list with as many people that are useful to your goals as possible. The way you achieve this is simply by trading on a consistent basis. You will get friend requests pretty regularly and you want to accept those. It costs you nothing but a bit of time.

The criteria I use when determining if it is worth developing a relationship with someone that I add or who adds me is the following:
1) How pleasant the person is to talk to
2) Their inventory
3) Their friends list
4) Their knowledge
5) Their reputation

Generally, based on this knowledge it is fairly easy to determine if it is worth your time to develop a rapport with an individual. If they are not nice to talk to or act like a prick, then obviously you don't want to deal with them. If they're obviously new to trading and don't have any knowledge you can utilize later on, then you don't have much to gain from keeping them on your friendslist aside from enjoying their company.

However, if someone fits all the above criteria, the benefits are quite significant

1) Having many reputable traders on your friends list is a form of reputation itself and it makes adding other people much easier because you will usually have many common friends

2) Knowing knowledgeable traders will allow you to get any item PCd fairly quickly

3) It allows you to develop a supplier-customer relationship as in you might find
someone who always has keys to sell or to whom you can always quicksell your items at a decent price when you need to

4) It is enjoyable and informative to talk to people you share a common interest with. You can learn a lot just through a casual conversation

5) It allows you to quickly buy nearly any item. Once you've built up your friendlist, chances are someone on there is selling the item you want to buy or knows someone that is

6) You have multiple trusted traders that can vouch for your integrity

Now, it is important to emphasize that networking is a two-way street. You will have questions and favors to ask and when someone comes to you with similar requests, it's only reasonable to help them out. People will go out of their way to give you a hand if you're nice to talk to or have volunteered help to them in the past.

I would like to end this short write up by clarifying that you should not look at any interaction solely in terms of what you can gain from it. If you enjoy talking to someone who cannot help you in any way in your trading efforts, don't delete them. Trading is about meeting people, having fun and making a bit of money on the side. However, it pays to keep the criteria I listed in the back of your head whenever you talk to someone new.

Thanks for reading

When making a post in this group, please use the following tags so others can view discussions more clearly.

[PC] - price check
[TO] - trade offer evaluation
[DISC] - general discussion about a certain topic
[MISC] - anything that doesn't fall under the other tags
[REQ] - request the coverage of a specific topic by admins/mods

Thank you

Hello everyone,

After encouraging feedback on a reddit post I made, I have decided to go through with the creation of this group.

My goal is to provide other traders with good information concerning the price of their items, the value of a trade offer they've received and anything else you can think of.

Additionally, I will be writing regular articles on the topic of trading, hopefully covering some aspects that people haven't thought about writing yet.

About myself:

I have been trading since last year. My current inventory value is around 1700 keys and it has been as high as 3000 in the past. I am friends with a lot of high-tier traders and have picked up a lot of knowledge through my past dealings.

I enjoy helping people achieve their trading goals and will do whatever I can do assist them.

Now, I'd like to cover some of the basic rules of this group:

1) Do not flame or insult each other
2) Do not post your trades here
3) Do not attempt to shark users (if someone adds you from this group and intentionally tries to shark you, please contact me)
4) Do not attempt to give out advice unless you have the knowledge to do so
5) Please use the tags listed in the other pinned discussion when posting
6) Do not post "I have __ keys, what should I buy?" posts, they are useless. Just take your amount of keys and multiply it by currency then by 0.80-0.85.

DISCLAIMER: Price checks might not always be 100% accurate. Prices shift fairly often and whilst I, and anyone I work with on this group, try to stay up to date on prices and do additional research for each item people ask about, we cannot always be completely certain that the price is perfectly accurate.