CS:GO Trading 101 by styleeee
Hello everybody! Lately a lot of friends and fellow traders ask me for trade advice. They ask me about prices, patterns, scammers, screenshots, items, etc. But the truth is trading takes a lot of time. You have to research prices, patterns, talk to people, look for trades, scan lounge and all this takes a lot of time. So trading for myself takes enough of my own time. Therefore I made this guide so I can explain you the basics of trading. I want to note that this guide is based on my own trading experience, and other high tier knife trades might not agree with me on some points. This is just my perspective on trading.

A bit about my trading career
The first skin I bought was a Karambit |Case Hardened (BS) (check my very first screenshots). I just started playing cs:go and I saw the item drops and skins on market. I never even opened a case at that point, nor did I have money in my steam wallet. I played a lot of online poker at the mid stakes and a poker buddy of mine told me he had unboxed a knife. He asked me if I would buy it from him with money on pokerstars. After I inspected market I agreed on paying him 150$ for the karambit.

As soon as I bought it I put it on market (had to add 5€ to my steam wallet and wait 30 days before I could sell it), it was on market for 24 hours and it sold for 200€. So the first thing I did was buy 50 keys and 50 cases and opened them all: best skin was 8 euro (♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ rigged).
I bought some nametags and other crap and with my last 50 euro I bought an stat ak case hardened. I started betting on ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and started to win some skins. I started batting bigger to a point were I lost almost all my inventory on a few games. So I stopped betting and traded my ak for a knife (flip knife safari). From that moment on I kept on trading. What I did was downgrade the knife with overpay, and then trade for a new knife. On each trade I made a small profit of one or two euro’s

My inventory kept expending until I saw people buying quicksells for keys. This seemed like a good way of generating extra value so I sold my whole inventory for keys and started buying (low tier) knifes for 80% market price. It went very fast from that point. Within 7 days I doubled my inventory (from 44 keys to 95 keys).

I kept on doing this and I still do this. I started trading the 3rd of February 2014. Now 10 months later my inventory is valued at around 1800€. Even tho I got scammed in July for a karambit case hardened (ww). At that point I only owned gut slaughter (FN) and the karambit case (ww). So I sold the gut for 44 keys and started all over again. So I can say I traded from 100€ value to 1800€ value in 4 months. Here are some tips and tricks how to do it:

Its very important that you don’t trade with emotion. This is something they also teach you when youre going to trade stocks/valuta/shares/etc. It is all about the value! In the end we want cool skins, but the only way you are getting the cool skins is by trading all skins. You not gonna trade your flip night for a karambit fade, you need to make a lot of trades and your gonna own items you don’t like. But that does not matter. Its all about the value of the items. If you can trade your item for an item that has more value: always do it. Try to make sure you make a profit on every trade you make, and try to make as much trades as you can in the least amount of time. This wil get you to the Kara Fade the fastest way without spending money. This doesn’t mean you should lowball everybody!

Sometimes the person whit whom you are trading with isn’t sure about the trade, need some more time to think it over, or need some extra adds. This will happen a lot and will cost u a lot of time. Whatever you do, don’t go and rage/flame. It wont help you in anyway. The best result will come from being nice and patient. If the person who you are trading with isn’t polite and just a rage kid, don’t waste time and energy: you have a block list on lounge and steam, use it. Also lowballing and highballing will give the opposite effect. If u lowball people they ill –rep you, report you, block you, etc. Just try to make fair trades, sometimes you will be lucky and make trades that will make you very good profit. And the person you traded with will even thank you for the trade!

A lot of ppl look an item up on steam market and see only the price its listed for. This price can be much higher then the price it sells for. So always look at the graphs, you can see how many units were sold, at what time, and for what price. It isn’t hard to calculate an average selling price, but for the people who are bad at math there is steamanalyst.com. Steam analyst shows the average prices in euro/usd/pounds and even the value in keys! But notice that they keys listed for each item on analyst is far more then you would get when you sell the item on steam market. Steamanalyst uses 100 to 105% marketprice in keys.

Another note: Steam market only gos up to 300€. So the prices of items not listed on market (high tier items/knifes) aren’t correct on steam analyst! For example: if you look up Karambit Fade (FN) on steam analyst it will say 320€ / 150 keys. This is because some noobs don’t have a clue and unbox a kara fade, they put it on market and its instantly sells. Also because of scammers. If a scammer scams a high tier knifes its likely he will send it to his main and sell it fast on market so steamsupport cant trade back the item (I think). So the prices for high tier skins/knifes can’t be found on market/steamanalyst. How to value these items I will explainlater.

The easiest way to make a quick profit is to trade with keys. A lot of people (degenerates) like to unbox cases. Other people just need keys quick or some people have knifes that do not sell very often on market. Therefore they want to quicksell their knife to you! Quicksell means they want to sell their knife quick for 80% to 85% of the market price. Note that when u sell a knife on steam market, you will pay 15% steam fee. So for example, someone owns a karambit night battle scarred and he offers it to you for quicksell keys. You look up market and you see its listed for 180€. Now you look closer and you see it sells for 150 to 160€. Then you look at the units sold and you notice that the knife don’t sell very often. If this person puts his knife on market, he might have to wait 3 days before its sols, and trhen he can buy keys. So he has to list it for 160€ and wait 3 days, but he wants keys now. So this is were you step in. If u do the math you will see that his 160€ items will give him 68 keys. (160€ * 0.85 (steam fee reduced) = 132€. 132€ / 1.99 (key price) = 68.3) But he knows he has to wait long till someone buys it and he need the keys now.
So in this case you can never offer him more then 63 keys because 63 keys is you stop-loss. This means that you will always break even on the item, so if u cant trade it for profit you van always sell it yourself on the market and you don’t have to take a loss. So its better to offer 60 keys, this way you will always make 3 keys profit, even if u sell it at the steam market and have to wait 3 days till the item gets sold.

So lets say you bought the knife for 60 keys, now you have to sell it or trade it for a profit. The best way is to put up trades in lounge, as many as you can. How to do this the best way ill explain later. But the best way is to trade it for a knife that is the same value, but sells much more, so therefore has higher demand. For example, m9 vanilla is only 135€ on steam market, but ppl will pay 65 keys anyday, anytime for it. So if you can trade you kara night bs that you bought for 60 keys, for an m9 vanilla with adds. Youll be making easy and quick 10 keys profit without breaking a sweat!

Well im not going to explain how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ works, were to find your own trade url and stuff like that. What I will explain is how your trades should look, so you have “maximum market reach”. With this I mean: you can use the any offers or any knife symbol in your trade, but the thing with this is that people will only see this at the moment you create or bump your trade. Most people don’t search for “any offers” or “any knifes”. They search for specific items or keys.

So when you make a quicksell trade, put your keys on one side (its best to put one of each six different keys and the “any key” symbol on one side, and the knifes you want to quickbuy on the other side. Lounge lets you post a maximum of 6 trades, each trade can contain 8 items/symbols on either side. This means you can look for (6x8) 48 different items at the same time.

Here is an example of my quicksell trade: {LINK REMOVED}http://♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.com/trade?t=29729575

Now you’ve bought an item and you need to sell it for profit.

Put your knife on one side and stuff you want on the other side. You can go to steam market, select cs:go and type in knife. Now u can list all knifes from the most expensive one till the cheapest one. Go to the 170€ range and check all the knifes (average selling prices and listed prices) and put them all on the right side. This improves the chances of finding someone that wants to trade you. Because when he goes to lounge, and goes to search (fills in his items and klicks search) he will find your trade.

I could post a list of knifes, patterns and value in keys, but there are a lot of lists out there so I wont. The best way to realy find accurate prices of any knife is to look up lounge. It is very easy and you get realtime information! The only thing you have to do is search for the item you want to know the price from on lounge. Just look up people who own it (look up their trades) and see what they ask for theyr item. But more important: see what people offer! You can also check screenshot and compare them to the same item with different looks, and compare the buy-outs and offers. This isn’t hard, it just takes time but it will give you the best knowledge of prices! You will see in the price lists you find online that for example butterfly fade (yellow, the lowest) is 220 keys. Well I can tell you I found 50/50 butterfly fades for 210 keys, so don’t go blind on the lists you find online. But to give you an impression here is one:
http://steamproxy.com/groups/CSGOPricecheck#announcements/detail/233384570623908380

Well, ive been scammed once. Please don’t get scammed like me. Here are some links to the most use scam methods and how to avoid getting scammed:
http://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensiveTrade/wiki/commonscams
http://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensiveTrade/comments/2fkn40/psa_lets_talk_about_scams_guys/
note: I would never use a middleman, and I would never go first selling skins for money. I do not lend my skins to friends or family. Don’t take risk when its not needed is my advice.
Well, now u know about the basic trade stuff, there is a lot more to tell about patterns (fade, slaughter, crimson web, case hardened, blue steel) and other stuff. I will maybe write another guide about that later. First lets see if you guys enjoy this :)

I apologize for my bad English and im glad you made it all the way to this point. Also this is my first guide, so ill be probably editting it a few times soon.

Feel free to send me sweets for sharing my knowledge with you, now you will make a lot of value trading ;) Just don’t waste your profit opening cases: in the long run you will loose a lot of value on it. First get the value, then get the skins you want, then be degen and bet and open cases. Set your goal and trade to it! GLHF!