User blog comment:Kentnar/How to be an actual god at trading?/@comment-32197189-20190901104700

I think it's about recognising trends in the market.

For example, a couple years ago, large promo pets skyrocketed from like a decent-good long, to multiple black longs (the best seal in the game, Cloudylad, is priceless)

I saw the same thing happening with smaller promo pets like 5 months ago, so I invested a lot in them. I probably paid.. idk 2 black longs'? total, and now they're worth close to 12 (I've traded a lot off, the ones I have right now probably only amount to 8) black longs. (this is a really rough estimate I made just then so don't quote me on that)

Right now, I think the money is in party hats

It's also not a bad idea to grind certain seasonal adventures, and play seasonally - for example, Lucky Clovers has about a 13% spike drop-rate, and that isn't accounting for the 8 seasonal prizes you'll receive, plus the nm prize which has about a 5% Nerds drop-rate.

You can pay 400 gems for an item that someone will pay 5 RIMs for 9 months later, and while this is a slower way of making profit, it's a pretty sturdy method.

It's also a good idea to get a few of each item that you feel won't be returning to stores for a while. An example of this that I missed out on would be Maegyn's Pet Bears - there wasn't any guarantee or reason for AJ to re-release them.

You can afford to be very picky about which trades you accept too. You don't ever need to let anyone guilt you into giving them your items or things for cheap. You also tend to learn which traders are a pain to trade.

Some other strategies I use:


 * Always have at least 500 diamonds on hand, in the off-chance someone sells something worth more than orange long in their shop.


 * Don't go around with super flexy trade lists, but also don't go around with super nooby ones either - people are put off by flex ones, and try to rip off noobs


 * Check people that look like a noob's pet lists for quality pets (yeah I suppose it is k i n d  o f  a hustle but if they're happy and they don't miss it then sometimes that's not a biggie.


 * ART - 4 ideas here:

- I don't ever take commissions - it's a lot of work for only one payout, unless you think you can do something that other people will buy

- Keep up with memes - you can sometimes make a quick buck making funny aj-versions of memes

- Bring something interesting to the table - there are 9832456754 different toothless pieces out there

- Sell your art for rares, rather than diamonds. People rarely pay large amounts of diamonds for art. If word gets out that you sell your art for diamonds, it'll take off the demand.


 * DON'T BURN YOUR BRIDGES. Make friends. That's number 1 in importance, really. It's all about your reputation, and you don't want to have the reputation of someone who chooses rares over friends. That said, almost all of the top rare people (with exceptions of Pugfluff and Arcticxpup) have either scammed, hacked, lied (indirect scamming as far as I'm concerned), or are just pretty ratty people in general. Those people have devoted literally thousands of hours to the game, and I mean, there are a lot of other things you can do with thousands of hours.

Wow that was an essay and a half, I hope something helps here :)