iribuya [2103695] —
Original article
In a city where everything is for sale, it’s just a matter of finding someone who will pay the right price. Read Iribuya's story of how to start small and become a big time trader.
There are plenty of articles which tell you how to make money in Torn through reviving, doing odd jobs, selling losses and the rest. Most of these can be defined as 'a service that involves swapping Torn-Energy / real-life-time to Torn cash'. But how do you move to the next level? Today, on my 365th day in Torn, I would like to bring you the story of how I transformed from a simple city item buyer to become a regular fixture in the top 5 bazaar sellers through trading, wheeling and dealing.
What is the Torn Economy?
Before we begin, you should understand that Torn's economy works and is managed just like a real economy. The value of items is 'decided' by the players: they pay what they think something is worth. If everyone suddenly decides that smoke grenades ($97k) are totally useless and pepper spray ($1,5k) is much better, we will see the prices change accordingly, until the right balance of supply and demand has been found. This goes for all items in Torn, from 100% useful things like Xanax or 100% useless objects like Maneki Neko statues. The buyers decide the price and the sellers just have to go along with it.
The Beginning
One of the first ways I earned money was through purchasing items from the city shops. You can buy 100 items every day and resell on the item market or directly to other players. Some items, like beer and kittens, can be flipped for almost 40x their buy price, resulting in a net profit of around $80k per day. This seemed too good to be true at first, and so it eventually proved, as I learned that some shop bought items are much harder to resell. I bought 100 Bottles of Champagne for $3,000 each, and the profit I made was far lower than what I was expecting.
The 100 daily item limit capped my growth at first, because while $80k per day was nice, it was never enough to pay my bills. The solution was to hire other players to buy 100 items for me. New players who had only just started and needed money were perfect candidates, so I sent out 50-100 mails per day to active newbies identified using advanced search. Due to my dislike of the trading system I asked them to send the items to me and let me send them cash afterwards, otherwise, both of us would need to be online at the same time.
The reactions I received varied greatly. Some players called me a scammer because they didn't believe I would send them their cash after the transaction. Others who were more trusting were truly amazed by my offer, and would deliver 100 items to me on a daily basis. This resulted in a lot of admin when it came to sending these players their cash, but in the golden days, selling in this way netted me around $2-4 million per day - easily enough to pay for my daily diet of three Xanax with some change to spare.
Pictured: Every Soundcloud rapper's Instagram page.
Flying High
Baldr's guide promised me riches after I reached level 15 and could start flying, so I invested my early profits in power leveling using his targets and hoping for the best. My first flight to Mexico saw me return with fourteen Dahlia's, and when I sold those with a profit of $35,000 I knew this was going to be worth my while. Fly, buy, fly back, sell and repeat. This was easy money, but I still wanted to know how I could squeeze even more revenue out of this method.
After reading some guides which I felt only told half the story, I decided I would write one myself, because what else can I do while flying? This guide became very popular, and soon I started to receive chats from random traders insisting I buy their flowers for $2-3k less than the market value I was selling it for. Offers like this were a no-brainer, and they helped me expand my total daily income by simply reselling items that others had done the leg work to acquire.
Some days people came to me with 80 Camel Plushies and I just had to say 'sorry no cash for that'. But my cash was growing rapidly, and I was very lucky to have access to a vault early on that helped store this money safely for when a particularly valuable trade came along.
Number Crunching
More and more trades came my way and I was spending more time on a calculator than actually playing the game. At first this was fine, but after a few time-wasters tested my patience I decided enough was enough. A system was needed to make this trading business easier or I would just get a headache. Thankfully, I soon came across a trader who had built a spreadsheet on google sheets, so I asked him how he'd made it.
After a little experimentation my first price sheet was born. It included pictures and prices of the items as well as a working link to my profile. Google Sheets is made for handling complex calculations, so I built a massive sheet with all my prices in followed by blank boxes for the amount values. All I had to do now was enter in the number of Crocuses, Donator Packs or Fruitcakes and a total value would come rolling out. This system made trading large quantities of items really easy, with the price values quickly adjustable according to inflation.
Pictured: An average day at Iribuya's bazaar.
Evolving Economy and Inflation
Certain events in Torn will drive up the price of certain items. Other events may render them worthless. The forthcoming St Patrick's day event will increase the alcohol nerve boost by three, thus making alcohol almost 30% more expensive for a short duration. You can be sure I've used my Google Sheet to prepare for this ahead of time.
On the other hand, a bug during the double item flying day event resulted in the developers sending one Business Class Ticket to everyone who had flown but not received the bonus. This well-intentioned act increased BCT circulation massively, and their price dropped by 40% almost instantly. Unfortunately, the prices on my sheet were not updated in real time, and if I didn't pay attention, that meant I could end up paying 30% more for items that had lost their value.
This problem needed a solution, and it came in the form of Torn's Application Programming Interface, or API. The API can be used to gather information from the top three bazaar listings for any one item. After enough information has been gathered, you can safely guess the value of an item at any one time using this method. I had no idea how to use Torn's API, though, so I found someone with the skills to extract this and paid him well to keep the system running.
My sheet now updated the price for most items every hour, so when Peony Flowers increased or decreased randomly in price by $5,000 for some unknown reason, the price I provided would end up being fair to both myself and the customer, based on the current market trends. Everybody wins!
Time is Money
With an automated price sheet on my side, the huge number of customers I had made it more profitable to stay in town to trade rather than perform flower runs myself. Yet still, I found myself spending too much time viewing my various different sheets and not enough time playing Torn. Trading made me a great income, but it wasn't really that much fun. Even flying away for three hours and returning seemed easier - and when something makes traveling enjoyable, you know you need to make a change.
Then something miraculous happened that would forever transform my trading game, and, I believe, that of all of Torn's future traders. A young trader told me how to access a website which provided you with automatically updating prices and a calculator that only needed to be fed the copy/paste of a trade. The price / profit and a couple of chat responses were generated for me to copy and paste. This meant every single trade could have a random bunch of items in it and I could have the price in one second.
In an instant my trading business was made easier to run than ever before. In place of the headaches I got from looking at too many sheets, I now had ego strokes from people PM'ing me after a trade wondering how I could have gotten the total value of the trade so fast.
Occupying New Players
One of the best things this new trading tool did for me was to reopen my access to the small item market. I used to focus on making as much profit as I could from as few items as possible. However, with these super fast calculations available, I could now trade huge quantities of cheap, low-profit items and turn a larger profit than if I were flipping fewer expensive items.
Thus, one of my more popular services called recycling was born. I advertised that new players who wanted quick cash could find cheap items on the market and sell them to me. They would earn $50 per item (when buying in bulks of hundreds much faster of course) and in return, I had an army of new, active players willing to do my dirty work.
PictureD: My corporate logo. I paid a PR team $20 million for this.
I found collectors paying better margins for super bulks of over 50,000 jackets, beer etc, which meant I could increase my buying prices even further. Selling in bulk always gets you a better rate, because many players are lazy and prefer to buy 100 cans at a time instead of just one. It's all just a matter of finding them and appealing to their collection instinct. And now that I had the stocks to meet the needs of my bulk buying customers, nobody sniffed at the fact I charged a small premium for the privilege.
Bigger and Better Buyers
The trades went so well that I started averaging about 150 trades per day, and I must admit, most of these were small fish. But every small fish can become a whale one day, a whale that eventually finds a nice pair of Boxing Gloves in the city. My business plan was to build up my trust and respect, painting myself as a friendly, fair and quick trader, with the eventual hope that richer customers would drop by my bazaar.
This hope became a reality when people began coming to me with high-roller trades - sometimes more than $5 billion - because they were looking to invest in a company or stocks. I had some trusted friends in my faction who would help me with huge loans and quick sales if needed to facilitate these transactions, and having such people to back you up can prove useful in more ways than one.
Dealing with these mega customers could be quite risky if I didn't pay attention, but I'll write another article about the (largely preventable) dangers of making trades with large sums of money involved some other time.
Unique Customers
There is always room to expand your business, and the competition is always closer behind you than you realise. New traders popped up with their own price sheets and calculating websites almost every day. None has as many features as the one I have access to just yet, but one day they will. In anticipation of this eventuality, I am currently experimenting with different ways of finding customers and doing business.
For example, I recently started offering people the chance to place their high value ($1 billion+) items in my bazaar for a listing fee of 2% in the hopes that it will attract a better price in a high-profile setting. This worked well initially, but it soon resulted in too much administration for the amount of profit I made. Nevertheless, if I could increase the margins and reduce the workload, this would be a sound business strategy, as it offers other sellers the chance to piggyback off my success, while allowing me to earn money for basically nothing.
Pictured: Weeeeeeeeeeeeee!
The trust I had built up as a non-mugging trader (we do exist) has also brought some very rich new players to my door who had earned big in Russian Roulette. I found a way to make money from them by too by buying all their items or points to provide them with temporary liquid cash. When they won, the players instantly bought them back. I made a great margin on those deals. 20,000 points bought for $51,000 and sold for $52,000 a couple minutes later is not a difficult way to make a living!
I've only been able to start exploring this branch of the Torn economy since my cash situation improved to the point where I could accommodate these players' needs. But as with all things in life, marketing yourself to those who need this service is the trickiest part. You might be trustworthy, reliable, hardworking and punctual, but if none can find you, there will be zero customers knocking at your door.
Marketing
Getting my name out there is something I work on every day. There are many common ways for traders to do this: trade chat, trade forum and adverts in the Torn Newspaper all work well. But you have to be unique, effective and maybe a little bit annoying for people to notice you. As my business expanded my marketing budget also went up too, so I was able to pay a player to send out emails to potential customers who worked in Sweet Shops or had just turned level 15.
My latest marketing trick is to place a $5 million bounty on BodyBagger along with an advertisement as the reason. A risky venture you may think, but BodyBagger has given me permission to do this, and who in their right mind is going to attack Torn's strongest player for $5 million? This nifty trick means I'll always be at the top of the bounty page so long as I keep this up.
It is also important to me that I'm in the top five of the busiest bazaars as advertised in the Newspaper's side bar. I also regularly post on the popular Torn Discord channels as a trader too. There are some bigger plans in the future to get my name out there, but I can't share those at the time. Even if I did, you'd be better served by formulating your own unique strategies rather than copying someone else. Because otherwise, when I run out of ideas, so do you.
Summary of my First Year
The reason I wrote this article is because today I passed my one-year anniversary in Torn, and if I can say so myself, it was quite a successful year. My daily stat-training budget is now around $50 million and this is easily sustained by my trading income. After one year of playing I've gained 2,100 Torn friends and have completed over 21,000 trades.
Both these have put me in the #1 spot on those particular stats, and my weekly bazaar sales have kept me at #1 on the weekly bazaar listings for the past month - this represents the best trading month I've ever had, gaining me 2,148 customers and a sales total of almost 1.1 million individual items. I also started the most popular trading thread with over 750 likes and 500 unique player reviews.
And all of this has been achieved in 365 days. This surely puts paid to the notion that new players can't succeed here due to the strength of the old guard. The key to my success is that when I started I laid out some personal goals that seemed impossible at the time. I never thought I would reach these goals, but I still strove for them anyway, and I reached most quicker then expected.
To any new traders I would say never give up on trading or making a name for yourself, because you can all do what I have done. Maybe you'll even do it quicker than me? Anything is possible, but it will require your time and energy, because Torn is like real life; nothing comes for free. Think long-term and have patience, and your rewards will eventually come.
Pictured: Another image for the w**k bank.
Future Plans
As time goes on, I've seen more and more rich customers come to me to sell all sorts of random junk knowing they'll receive a fair price for their items. It is becoming increasingly common for rich players to clear out their display cases and inventories so they can invest that money in something worthwhile now that we're all warring and bombing each other. I expect to receive more of this kind of business throughout 2019, and I'll hopefully expand into trading unique weapons, armors, collectibles and private islands, if my cash remains liquid enough!
I've also realised that more can be achieved when you work with others as a team. My partnering with Eski and Mary22108 will soon be solidified into a real company hierarchy where each of us has our own unique role. The combined forces of our marketing machines will hopefully get our names into every corner of Torn. I'm currently happy with the partnerships I have, but most Torn traders know that I'm always prepared to look at simple collaborations in prices and sales tactics if they don't take up too much time.
Thank you for reading this article. I hope it has given you some insight into what it takes you make something of yourself during your first year in Torn. Hopefully, I'll see you in my shop one day buying Xanax or any other daily essentials. My inbox is always open to business proposals, and Ialways have enough cash on hand to handle your unique trading requirements rarely carry cash, if any muggers are watching.
Thank you to everyone who has supported me in bringing up a first time player! I hope this article pays some of your help forward.
What is the Torn Economy?
Before we begin, you should understand that Torn's economy works and is managed just like a real economy. The value of items is 'decided' by the players: they pay what they think something is worth. If everyone suddenly decides that smoke grenades ($97k) are totally useless and pepper spray ($1,5k) is much better, we will see the prices change accordingly, until the right balance of supply and demand has been found. This goes for all items in Torn, from 100% useful things like Xanax or 100% useless objects like Maneki Neko statues. The buyers decide the price and the sellers just have to go along with it.
The Beginning
One of the first ways I earned money was through purchasing items from the city shops. You can buy 100 items every day and resell on the item market or directly to other players. Some items, like beer and kittens, can be flipped for almost 40x their buy price, resulting in a net profit of around $80k per day. This seemed too good to be true at first, and so it eventually proved, as I learned that some shop bought items are much harder to resell. I bought 100 Bottles of Champagne for $3,000 each, and the profit I made was far lower than what I was expecting.
The 100 daily item limit capped my growth at first, because while $80k per day was nice, it was never enough to pay my bills. The solution was to hire other players to buy 100 items for me. New players who had only just started and needed money were perfect candidates, so I sent out 50-100 mails per day to active newbies identified using advanced search. Due to my dislike of the trading system I asked them to send the items to me and let me send them cash afterwards, otherwise, both of us would need to be online at the same time.
The reactions I received varied greatly. Some players called me a scammer because they didn't believe I would send them their cash after the transaction. Others who were more trusting were truly amazed by my offer, and would deliver 100 items to me on a daily basis. This resulted in a lot of admin when it came to sending these players their cash, but in the golden days, selling in this way netted me around $2-4 million per day - easily enough to pay for my daily diet of three Xanax with some change to spare.
Pictured: Every Soundcloud rapper's Instagram page.
Flying High
Baldr's guide promised me riches after I reached level 15 and could start flying, so I invested my early profits in power leveling using his targets and hoping for the best. My first flight to Mexico saw me return with fourteen Dahlia's, and when I sold those with a profit of $35,000 I knew this was going to be worth my while. Fly, buy, fly back, sell and repeat. This was easy money, but I still wanted to know how I could squeeze even more revenue out of this method.
After reading some guides which I felt only told half the story, I decided I would write one myself, because what else can I do while flying? This guide became very popular, and soon I started to receive chats from random traders insisting I buy their flowers for $2-3k less than the market value I was selling it for. Offers like this were a no-brainer, and they helped me expand my total daily income by simply reselling items that others had done the leg work to acquire.
Some days people came to me with 80 Camel Plushies and I just had to say 'sorry no cash for that'. But my cash was growing rapidly, and I was very lucky to have access to a vault early on that helped store this money safely for when a particularly valuable trade came along.
Number Crunching
More and more trades came my way and I was spending more time on a calculator than actually playing the game. At first this was fine, but after a few time-wasters tested my patience I decided enough was enough. A system was needed to make this trading business easier or I would just get a headache. Thankfully, I soon came across a trader who had built a spreadsheet on google sheets, so I asked him how he'd made it.
After a little experimentation my first price sheet was born. It included pictures and prices of the items as well as a working link to my profile. Google Sheets is made for handling complex calculations, so I built a massive sheet with all my prices in followed by blank boxes for the amount values. All I had to do now was enter in the number of Crocuses, Donator Packs or Fruitcakes and a total value would come rolling out. This system made trading large quantities of items really easy, with the price values quickly adjustable according to inflation.
Pictured: An average day at Iribuya's bazaar.
Evolving Economy and Inflation
Certain events in Torn will drive up the price of certain items. Other events may render them worthless. The forthcoming St Patrick's day event will increase the alcohol nerve boost by three, thus making alcohol almost 30% more expensive for a short duration. You can be sure I've used my Google Sheet to prepare for this ahead of time.
On the other hand, a bug during the double item flying day event resulted in the developers sending one Business Class Ticket to everyone who had flown but not received the bonus. This well-intentioned act increased BCT circulation massively, and their price dropped by 40% almost instantly. Unfortunately, the prices on my sheet were not updated in real time, and if I didn't pay attention, that meant I could end up paying 30% more for items that had lost their value.
This problem needed a solution, and it came in the form of Torn's Application Programming Interface, or API. The API can be used to gather information from the top three bazaar listings for any one item. After enough information has been gathered, you can safely guess the value of an item at any one time using this method. I had no idea how to use Torn's API, though, so I found someone with the skills to extract this and paid him well to keep the system running.
My sheet now updated the price for most items every hour, so when Peony Flowers increased or decreased randomly in price by $5,000 for some unknown reason, the price I provided would end up being fair to both myself and the customer, based on the current market trends. Everybody wins!
Time is Money
With an automated price sheet on my side, the huge number of customers I had made it more profitable to stay in town to trade rather than perform flower runs myself. Yet still, I found myself spending too much time viewing my various different sheets and not enough time playing Torn. Trading made me a great income, but it wasn't really that much fun. Even flying away for three hours and returning seemed easier - and when something makes traveling enjoyable, you know you need to make a change.
Then something miraculous happened that would forever transform my trading game, and, I believe, that of all of Torn's future traders. A young trader told me how to access a website which provided you with automatically updating prices and a calculator that only needed to be fed the copy/paste of a trade. The price / profit and a couple of chat responses were generated for me to copy and paste. This meant every single trade could have a random bunch of items in it and I could have the price in one second.
In an instant my trading business was made easier to run than ever before. In place of the headaches I got from looking at too many sheets, I now had ego strokes from people PM'ing me after a trade wondering how I could have gotten the total value of the trade so fast.
Occupying New Players
One of the best things this new trading tool did for me was to reopen my access to the small item market. I used to focus on making as much profit as I could from as few items as possible. However, with these super fast calculations available, I could now trade huge quantities of cheap, low-profit items and turn a larger profit than if I were flipping fewer expensive items.
Thus, one of my more popular services called recycling was born. I advertised that new players who wanted quick cash could find cheap items on the market and sell them to me. They would earn $50 per item (when buying in bulks of hundreds much faster of course) and in return, I had an army of new, active players willing to do my dirty work.
PictureD: My corporate logo. I paid a PR team $20 million for this.
I found collectors paying better margins for super bulks of over 50,000 jackets, beer etc, which meant I could increase my buying prices even further. Selling in bulk always gets you a better rate, because many players are lazy and prefer to buy 100 cans at a time instead of just one. It's all just a matter of finding them and appealing to their collection instinct. And now that I had the stocks to meet the needs of my bulk buying customers, nobody sniffed at the fact I charged a small premium for the privilege.
Bigger and Better Buyers
The trades went so well that I started averaging about 150 trades per day, and I must admit, most of these were small fish. But every small fish can become a whale one day, a whale that eventually finds a nice pair of Boxing Gloves in the city. My business plan was to build up my trust and respect, painting myself as a friendly, fair and quick trader, with the eventual hope that richer customers would drop by my bazaar.
This hope became a reality when people began coming to me with high-roller trades - sometimes more than $5 billion - because they were looking to invest in a company or stocks. I had some trusted friends in my faction who would help me with huge loans and quick sales if needed to facilitate these transactions, and having such people to back you up can prove useful in more ways than one.
Dealing with these mega customers could be quite risky if I didn't pay attention, but I'll write another article about the (largely preventable) dangers of making trades with large sums of money involved some other time.
Unique Customers
There is always room to expand your business, and the competition is always closer behind you than you realise. New traders popped up with their own price sheets and calculating websites almost every day. None has as many features as the one I have access to just yet, but one day they will. In anticipation of this eventuality, I am currently experimenting with different ways of finding customers and doing business.
For example, I recently started offering people the chance to place their high value ($1 billion+) items in my bazaar for a listing fee of 2% in the hopes that it will attract a better price in a high-profile setting. This worked well initially, but it soon resulted in too much administration for the amount of profit I made. Nevertheless, if I could increase the margins and reduce the workload, this would be a sound business strategy, as it offers other sellers the chance to piggyback off my success, while allowing me to earn money for basically nothing.
Pictured: Weeeeeeeeeeeeee!
The trust I had built up as a non-mugging trader (we do exist) has also brought some very rich new players to my door who had earned big in Russian Roulette. I found a way to make money from them by too by buying all their items or points to provide them with temporary liquid cash. When they won, the players instantly bought them back. I made a great margin on those deals. 20,000 points bought for $51,000 and sold for $52,000 a couple minutes later is not a difficult way to make a living!
I've only been able to start exploring this branch of the Torn economy since my cash situation improved to the point where I could accommodate these players' needs. But as with all things in life, marketing yourself to those who need this service is the trickiest part. You might be trustworthy, reliable, hardworking and punctual, but if none can find you, there will be zero customers knocking at your door.
Marketing
Getting my name out there is something I work on every day. There are many common ways for traders to do this: trade chat, trade forum and adverts in the Torn Newspaper all work well. But you have to be unique, effective and maybe a little bit annoying for people to notice you. As my business expanded my marketing budget also went up too, so I was able to pay a player to send out emails to potential customers who worked in Sweet Shops or had just turned level 15.
My latest marketing trick is to place a $5 million bounty on BodyBagger along with an advertisement as the reason. A risky venture you may think, but BodyBagger has given me permission to do this, and who in their right mind is going to attack Torn's strongest player for $5 million? This nifty trick means I'll always be at the top of the bounty page so long as I keep this up.
It is also important to me that I'm in the top five of the busiest bazaars as advertised in the Newspaper's side bar. I also regularly post on the popular Torn Discord channels as a trader too. There are some bigger plans in the future to get my name out there, but I can't share those at the time. Even if I did, you'd be better served by formulating your own unique strategies rather than copying someone else. Because otherwise, when I run out of ideas, so do you.
Summary of my First Year
The reason I wrote this article is because today I passed my one-year anniversary in Torn, and if I can say so myself, it was quite a successful year. My daily stat-training budget is now around $50 million and this is easily sustained by my trading income. After one year of playing I've gained 2,100 Torn friends and have completed over 21,000 trades.
Both these have put me in the #1 spot on those particular stats, and my weekly bazaar sales have kept me at #1 on the weekly bazaar listings for the past month - this represents the best trading month I've ever had, gaining me 2,148 customers and a sales total of almost 1.1 million individual items. I also started the most popular trading thread with over 750 likes and 500 unique player reviews.
And all of this has been achieved in 365 days. This surely puts paid to the notion that new players can't succeed here due to the strength of the old guard. The key to my success is that when I started I laid out some personal goals that seemed impossible at the time. I never thought I would reach these goals, but I still strove for them anyway, and I reached most quicker then expected.
To any new traders I would say never give up on trading or making a name for yourself, because you can all do what I have done. Maybe you'll even do it quicker than me? Anything is possible, but it will require your time and energy, because Torn is like real life; nothing comes for free. Think long-term and have patience, and your rewards will eventually come.
Pictured: Another image for the w**k bank.
Future Plans
As time goes on, I've seen more and more rich customers come to me to sell all sorts of random junk knowing they'll receive a fair price for their items. It is becoming increasingly common for rich players to clear out their display cases and inventories so they can invest that money in something worthwhile now that we're all warring and bombing each other. I expect to receive more of this kind of business throughout 2019, and I'll hopefully expand into trading unique weapons, armors, collectibles and private islands, if my cash remains liquid enough!
I've also realised that more can be achieved when you work with others as a team. My partnering with Eski and Mary22108 will soon be solidified into a real company hierarchy where each of us has our own unique role. The combined forces of our marketing machines will hopefully get our names into every corner of Torn. I'm currently happy with the partnerships I have, but most Torn traders know that I'm always prepared to look at simple collaborations in prices and sales tactics if they don't take up too much time.
Thank you for reading this article. I hope it has given you some insight into what it takes you make something of yourself during your first year in Torn. Hopefully, I'll see you in my shop one day buying Xanax or any other daily essentials. My inbox is always open to business proposals, and I
Thank you to everyone who has supported me in bringing up a first time player! I hope this article pays some of your help forward.
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