Oldschool Runescape Market Tracker

Over the weekend I decided to make a trading tool to see if I could make some ingame gold by analyzing the Oldschool Runescape market automatically. There are other websites tracking the OSRS market such as the Wiki GE and other trading sites; however, manually checking every item on those websites and trying to find good deals is very time-consuming, and it is impossible to check and evaluate all 3,700+ items and their values at once. Some or most Grand Exchange trackers have a paid option where paying users get notified of good deals and dumps, allowing players to quickly make some profit through flipping items with in-game gold. But I didn't want to pay, so I decided to try and make one myself.

It so happens that the OSRS Wiki has a free-to-use open API where I can fetch item data including volume and high/low prices from the last hour, and also another endpoint where I can fetch high and low prices for every item that changes every minute. This was all the data I needed to make calculations and find profitable flips. By comparing the prices between each datapoint I could find the margin for each item.

Outliers

I quickly realized that many items have a very huge margin. However, this was expected because of the tax on the Grand Exchange. Almost every item has a 2% tax when selling, up to 5 million gold, meaning if I were to flip items with a low margin—let's say 100gp to 101gp—then I would lose 1gp because of the tax. This means that to even make any gp, I would need to have at least a return on investment (ROI) of 2%. This makes it way harder to make any profit, because every trade has to exceed that.

There's also another problem that comes into play: volume. Some items are barely ever traded because of scarcity or usefulness in the game. By taking into account the volume and tax, I made multiple configs to filter out potentially bad or long-term investments. I didn't want to wait a week for an item to buy or sell. Every account in the game only has 8 total Grand Exchange slots, meaning you can only buy or sell 8 items at once. Filling these slots with low-volume items would likely decrease profits. I decided to stick with decently high-volume items (around 5+ traded for high-value items, and 1,000+ for low-value items) in order to attempt flipping items fast, similar to day trading (which I have no experience in).

To get notified of potential flips, I decided to use a Discord webhook which would ping me when an item fulfilled my requirements according to one of my many configs.

Proof of Concept

By using a Runelite plugin called "Flipping utilities" I could easily track my progress. After only one day of using the tool, I managed to make over 25 million gp with an ROI of around 15%. This was a huge success and would not have been possible to do manually, likely because of other people attempting to do the same thing.

Dumps

The biggest profit was from dumps, where many items get sold for a very low price at once, by bot farms or user error (people missing a zero when typing 1,000,000 for example, resulting in thousands of items getting sold to the market at a 90% discount). I noticed a trend in items that would go down in price by more than 30%. These items are mostly gathered from people using bots (automatically played characters, not allowed according to the terms of service). When these bots are finished farming items for the day, they dump all of it into the GE and cause the prices to crash. My tool catches these dumps and alerts me when it's time to place a buy offer. If I'm lucky, I manage to buy items for a hefty discount and can then sell them once the price recovers to normal.

The biggest profit I managed to make from one item was from a Dragon Boots dump. Other people on different forums also found this and managed to make profit. Some comments mentioned people having dump alerts being an unfair advantage—which I agree with—but I thought it was funny to read since I was using my own.

Now, after about 3–4 days of using this tool, I've made well over 50 million gp. This is comparable to the best moneymakers in the entire game, and all I did was stand next to the Grand Exchange. Meaning, this can be done by anyone who just started a new account. No other money maker is this good from low level—all you need is starting capital.

If I were to continue development, I would like to add a few things that I feel are still missing:

• Store historical data beyond 1 hour ago in a larger database.
• Create a web app where I can easily make configs and filters.
• Make calculations for decanting potions and armor sets.
• Make the alerts more visually pleasing (rather than just a Discord ping).
• Make a dynamic feed for potential flips.
• Add item trade risk calculation based on historical data.
• Use more advanced math calculations to find potential flips.

What did I learn?

Making money from trading can be very profitable; however, "day trading" like I've been doing for the past few days is not for me. Eyes glued to price graphs, having to react to alerts, and buying items faster than other people while risking in-game capital is very draining and stressful. It kind of ruins the enjoyment of actually playing the game.

The most enjoyable part was seeing something I made work in real time. I shared my findings with some friends and they also managed to make some profit.

Will I make this tool public?

Probably not. There are other, more sophisticated tools that people can pay for. I did this purely for my own entertainment and learning purposes.

Thanks for reading