Glossary
What every word on Offerbook means. Underlined terms across the site show these definitions when you hover or tap them.
Prices
- Instant-buy pricealso: insta-buy, high price
- The last price someone paid to buy an item straight away. It is usually the higher of the two prices.
- Instant-sell pricealso: insta-sell, low price
- The last price someone accepted to sell an item straight away. It is usually the lower of the two prices.
- Buy offeralso: buy at
- Place a buy offer at this price: the last price an instant seller accepted. It fills when someone sells into it, not instantly.
- Sell offeralso: sell at
- Then list what you bought at this price: the last price an instant buyer paid. The 2% GE tax comes off when it sells.
- Spread
- The gap between the instant-buy and instant-sell prices, before tax.
- Mid price
- Halfway between the instant-buy and instant-sell prices. Charts and market moves use it so one side can't skew them.
- Price agealso: data age, freshness
- How long ago the trade behind a price happened. Prices are real trades, not quotes, so an old price may have moved.The header shows when prices last updated site-wide; they refresh every minute. A green dot means under 2 minutes old, gold under 15 minutes, red older than that.
Profit and tax
- GE taxalso: tax
- The Grand Exchange keeps 2% of every sale, capped at 5m gp per item. Some items are exempt. Every profit on this site is after it.The seller pays it, per item, rounded down, so sales under 50 gp pay nothing.
- Net marginalso: margin
- Profit on one item: sell price minus buy price minus GE tax.
- Potential profit
- Net margin times the quantity one 4-hour window can realistically fill: the buy limit, 10% of what trades in 4 hours, or what your bankroll can buy, whichever is lowest.
- gp/hr
- Potential profit divided by the hours it takes to buy that many and sell them again.
- ROIalso: return
- Profit as a percentage of the gp you put in.
Choosing a flip
- Flipalso: flipping, merching
- Buying an item with a patient buy offer and selling it with a patient sell offer, keeping the gap.
- Buy limit
- The most of one item the GE lets you buy every 4 hours. Quantities here never exceed it.
- Bankrollalso: cash stack
- The gp you have to flip with. Lists only show trades you can afford, sized to it.
- Volumealso: hourly volume
- How many of an item traded in a period. Low volume means offers fill slowly or not at all.
- Cautious risk
- Only spreads that held all day, on heavy volume, at a steady price.
- Balanced risk
- Spreads that hold most of the time, with enough flow to exit.
- Bold risk
- Everything with a positive margin after tax, thin and volatile included.
- Rankalso: score
- How flips are ordered: expected gp/hr, scaled down when an offer is slow to fill, the price is old or the spread is unsteady.
The market
- gp tradedalso: turnover
- The total value of trades: units traded times price. It shows where the money is, not just how many items moved.
- Indexalso: sector index, sector
- A sector's actively traded items, weighted by gp traded, starting at 100. 110 means the sector is up 10%.
- Market move
- The price change of the 100 most-traded items against the same time yesterday.
- Pulse eventalso: dump, spike
- A price move of 5% or more in about 45 minutes on at least 3 times the item's usual volume.A dump is a fall and a spike is a rise. The flow label says who drove it.
Pulse flow labels
- Sellers unloading
- Price fell and most trades were sells. Someone is dumping stock; patient buy offers tend to fill well here.
- Buyers absorbing
- Price fell but most trades were buys. Buyers are soaking up the selling, so the drop may not run much further.
- Possible bait
- Price rose but most trades were sells. Often someone pushing the price up to sell into it; don't chase.
- Real buying
- Price rose and most trades were buys. Demand is behind the move.
- Mixed flow
- Buys and sells were roughly balanced, so the flow doesn't confirm or contradict the move.
Strategies
- High alchalso: alching, high level alchemy
- A spell that turns an item into a fixed amount of coins. It profits when the item costs less than that, minus the nature rune.
- Decanting
- Bob Barter at the GE converts potion doses for free, so cheaper doses can be turned into 4-dose potions and sold.
- Item sets
- The GE clerk swaps a set for its pieces, or back, for free. A price gap between the two is profit.
- Bond
- An item bought with real money that gives membership. Its gp price is what real money is worth in game.
Missing a word, or a definition that reads wrong? Email hello@offerbook.gg. How the numbers are worked out is on the About page.