Maverick has a history of getting rich from Auction Houses in World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. This experience helped him get the hang of Path of Exile’s Currency Exchange quickly.
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My Recommended Currency Exchange Pricing Strategy: Undercutting Competing Orders
When you’re trying to sell something, there are 2 relevant ratios the game shows you:
- Market ratios. Market ratios are from people who can fulfill your order. If you are selling items, they are the ones buying those items. If you are buying items, they are the ones selling those items. You can see the best current market ratio at the top. Hovering over it will show you the available stock at that ratio and the next best ratios.
- Competing ratios. Competing trades are from people who are trying to do the same thing you are. If you are selling an item, they are selling the same item. If you are buying an item, they are buying that same item. You can see the current competing ratios by hovering over the current market ratio and pressing Alt.
Competing Orders you see are those that are not yet fulfilled. It means they do not match the current market ratio, but they will be the first ones to fulfill when someone prices items at a more attractive market ratio. Similarly, the current market ratios are also unfulfilled, meaning that currently no one is interested buying at that ratio.
Path of Exile has a lot of players who trade, especially now that the Currency Exchange is out. Many of them trade in large quantities and for many of them, speed is of the essence. That means if you price items at a slightly better price than the current competing rates, things will sell fast. We are not talking overnight fast here, we are talking a lap around your hideout fast. Depending on the type of item you are trading, this can give you a lot of extra currency.
You can use this strategy both for selling items and buying items.
Fast Versus Optimized Undercutting
The fast way of undercutting is to look at the highest competing offer and then offer a slightly higher rate. Taking the above screenshot as an example, if we want to buy 20 of these scarabs, we could do 20×13 = 260 + 1 = 261. It’s 17 Chaos profit compared to buying at the current market price of 20×13.9 = 278.
The optimized way, however, may ignore the best competing offers if they don’t have a large stock. Taking the screenshot as an example again, we see that the person offering a 1:13 ratio only has 27 Chaos Orbs in stock. That means he will only be able to buy 2 more scarabs at this ratio. That order will be completed in a matter of seconds. After that, the top ratio will change to 11.70.
When looking at the next ratio of 11.70, we do see a fairly decent stock of Chaos. It would be less wise to ignore this ratio, so we’ll undercut it instead. Undercutting that person, we can do 20×11.70 + 1 = 235 Chaos. That’s a profit of 43 Chaos compared to buying at the current market ratio. Even compared to the fast undercutting method, it’s still a profit of 26 Chaos.
When I say “fast” and “optimized” I am talking about the amount of thinking and clicks. There is a lot of activity in the Currency Exchange, so both methods are fast in terms of selling. Just doing a single map or even a lap around your hideout will often fulfill orders with both methods.
This method will work better with some items than others, however. It also depends on several factors, which we’ll discuss next.
Things To Pay Attention To
When trying to get the most out of your trades at the Currency Exchange, consider the following:
- How much demand there is for items. The method detailed above works best for items that are traded semi-frequently, e.g., Scarabs, Essences, Fragments, Exotic Currency, Ancient Orbs. It doesn’t work as well for extremely often traded items such as Divines (where the difference between market ratios and competing trades is minimal) or Divination Cards (with exceptions such as Headhunter/Mageblood/Mirror Cards, these aren’t traded enough often to sell fast).
- The stocks of competing trades. If there is a competing trade with a huge stock, you will want to undercut it every single time, even if it is the top ratio. Do note, however, that competing trades when buying things show their stock of chaos/divines. They do NOT show the amount of items they want to buy.
- How large the gaps between ratios are. If the gaps are large, it is more worth it to ignore the top ratios and undercut the others. If there is only 0.1 difference, you probably want to undercut the highest ratio instead.
- Gold cost per item. If you are trading items that cost a lot of Gold, it may be better to buy at market ratios. This is because an unfulfilled trade will not refund your Gold. This factor is only relevant for a limited amount of items such as Divine Vessels (low demand later in the league), jeweller orbs, chromatic orbs and orbs of fusing. The difference between the market ratio and competing trades is often large for these items, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will fulfill. Many people are opting to buy these through the traditional trade site to save gold.
Trading in Divines
When selling items for Divines at the Currency Exchange, Gold cost is less relevant. That is because trading for a Divine Orb only costs the Gold equivalent of 10 Chaos Orbs. When buying items for Divine Orbs, it is however still relevant. That is because the gold fee is based on what you’re buying.
On the other hand, don’t forget that the stock of competing trades shows their Divine stock when you’re buying for Divines. For most items that means the listed orders will be able to buy quite a few more items than the listed stock. It also means you should be more careful when ignoring them when determining your own price.
If you’re at or at least near the level of trading in Divines, where there is a little less trade activity (but more volume per trade), there are a few things worth considering:
- Buying up competing trades. If there is a large difference between the highest competing trade and the next ratios, you can consider buying up that stock yourself. You can then combine it with your own stock and sell at a higher ratio.
- If you don’t quite have the stock to sell for a Divine Orb but you’re getting close to it (75%+), you may want to consider buying some more of that item for Chaos, then sell for a Divine. This will save quite a bit of Gold compared to selling your stock for Chaos Orbs.
The Easy/Fast Way of Pricing Items at the Currency Exchange
The easy way of pricing your item means selling at a ratio that will immediately fulfill. It is not my recommended method for most items, but for many PoE players speed is vital. To sell your items quickly, do this:
- First select the item you want to sell in the “I have” category and fill in how many items you have
- Select the item you want to sell it for (usually Chaos Orbs, Divine Orbs for higher quantities/more expensive items) in the “I want” category
…and that’s it. The game will automatically fill in the amount of “I want” items at the current market ratio, so you can just click the “Place Order” button at this point.
You may need to repeat these steps if your trade cannot be fully fulfilled at this ratio. The game refunds your gold based on how much of your order is still unfulfilled, so you are not losing gold when this happens. We’ll explain why this happens a bit further below.
Alternative Fast Way To Avoid Unfulfilled Orders
To avoid having to go through the above steps multiple times, you can do this instead:
- Select the item you want to sell in the “I have” category and their quantity, just like before
- Select the item you want to sell it for in the “I want” category. Overwrite the amount the game suggests by a slightly lower amount. E.g., if the game suggests a 1.35 ratio (such as 100 chaos orbs for 135 Gemcutter Prisms), put something like 95 instead.
But wait Maverick, you say, am I not getting ripped off doing it like this? The game even gives me a warning for it. The answer is no, you’re not. The Currency Exchange will still use the best available ratios, even if you are offering a better one. It will however never give you more than the amount you put in the “I want” category.
What will happen in this case is that you’ll get 95 Chaos Orbs right away, but you’ll have some leftover Gemcutter Prisms you’ll get back. You can then sell those right away (small trades are very unlikely to not get fully completed) or sell them next time.
Why Orders Sometimes Don’t Get Completely Fulfilled
Orders can get partially fulfilled when, after completing a trade at the best available ratio, the ratio you selected is no longer valid. Let’s say we want to sell our 128 Vaal Orbs for 52 Chaos Orbs, which is what the Currency Exchange suggests. This will show as a rounded ratio of 1:2.46, but the actual ratio is more like 1:2.461538….
There is someone who wants to buy 60 Vaal Orbs for 25 Chaos Orbs. This is a ratio of 1:2.4, which means this person is offering more Chaos Orbs than what we are asking. We fulfill this person’s order, so now we have 68 Vaal Orbs remaining. This does not match any amount of Chaos Orbs at a ratio of 1:2.46 or the non-rounded ratio, so you will just get your leftover Vaal Orbs and Chaos Orbs back.
As said before, we also get the Gold back for the unfulfilled part of our trade (52 – 25 = 27 Chaos Orbs worth of gold). You can either accept this scenario and the few extra clicks it brings or you can put items up for rounder ratios. E.g., you could have sold 125 Vaal Orbs up for 50 Chaos Orbs. In that scenario, the trade at 2.4 would still be fulfilled, but you’d have 65 Vaal Orbs remaining at a ratio of 2.5. This still matches 26 Chaos Orbs, so your order would remain open.