Black Market flipping, measured

This is the first of a weekly series, and it is deliberately built on numbers that are still true next month.

There is no shopping list in it. Good discounts die in seconds, so any list is stale before you read it. But there is a second trap under that one and most guides fall into it: a guide written off today's prices is also stale in a week, and then it is just wrong on the internet forever.

So almost everything below is measured on 7 and 30 day averages, not on this morning's listings. Two things follow from that choice. The margins here are smaller than the ones you usually see quoted, because an average is not a lucky moment. And they hold: on this data, a city and item paying above 30% on the 7 day averages was still doing it on the 30 day ones nine times out of ten.

Every fee on a flip, in one table

This is the part most flipping guides leave out, and it decides your floor. From the wiki, and it works the same everywhere including the Black Market:

The tax is 8%, cut to 4% with Premium. The setup fee is charged on the price you list, the moment you place or edit an order, and cancelling does not refund it.

Read that table as a route rather than a list, because it is the whole economics of the market sit. The two highlighted rows are the flip: buy from a standing sell order, sell straight into the Black Market's buy order. That is the only path of the four that pays a single fee. Every alternative adds one. Buy orders to get in cheaper cost 2.5% and the wait. Sell orders on the far side cost 2.5% on top of the tax and can sit for 30 days.

There is a second reading of that last row, and it is the one the rest of this post rests on. If you post your own sell order at the Black Market and wait instead of filling one that stands, the price to read is not the order sitting there right now: it is the average. You are betting the item comes back to it, and the waiting costs you nothing you were not already spending. That is market sitting, and it is why the numbers below are averages.

So there is one number to carry: on this route your only cost is the sales tax on the exit. To land 30% net you need 35% gross with Premium, and 41% without. If you are running this without Premium, 30% is not your floor, and that gap is the most expensive thing in this post.

Why a flip exists

From the wiki: whenever a mob is killed there is a chance a buy order is generated for the Black Market, and once enough active buy orders stack up for an item, the Black Market starts raising its price for that item. The Black Market is where the world's mobs get their loot from. If the game owes players a drop and the quota is used up, it raises the price instead of creating the item.

Two things follow. The Black Market's price for an item rises while nobody delivers it and drops when somebody does, so it saws rather than trends. And a flip is usually not someone mispricing an item in a city, it is demand piling up in Caerleon: whenever I split live flips by cause, more than half have the Black Market sitting above its own average, against around four in ten with a cheap city. That has held on every run. It tells you which side to read first, and it is the Caerleon side.

You fill the buy order, and the haul is the job

The Black Market only has buy orders, generated by the game. You either fill one now, or you post a sell order and wait for the price to climb to your ask. For flipping you fill the order.

This matters because the number people quote is often the Black Market's lowest sell order. The Black Market does not buy at that price. Get the two backwards and a line that reads 79% margin is worth a fraction of that, and you find out after the bag is already in Caerleon. That mistake is the subject of the next guide in this series, because it is worth its own arithmetic.

There is also no version of this where you skip the trip. Buying and reselling inside one city works and pays very little. The whole thing depends on Caerleon.

The quality rule people lose money on

The Black Market treats each quality as a separate item with its own buy order. Two lines from the wiki settle how it works: you can sell a higher quality item into a lower quality buy order but not the other way around, and a buy order accepts items of its own quality or higher.

Two things follow, and the second one is where the silver is.

Never pay a premium for quality on a flip. Across T5 to T8 gear, the median price the Black Market paid for a Good item is 1.01x what it paid for the Normal one. Outstanding 1.01x, Excellent 1.02x. Same on the 30 day window, to the second decimal. Quality does not carry through the loot table, so the Black Market has no reason to pay for it, and it does not. Anything you pay above the Normal price in a city is money you do not get back.

Always check the Normal order before you sell anything above Normal. This is the same fact seen from the other end, and it is not obvious. Those prices are equal on average, but at any given moment the buy order sitting on a high quality is usually the lower one, because fewer of those trade so its price has been bid up less often. So your Excellent item frequently sells for more into the Normal order than into its own.

How much that is worth, on live listings: pricing every item into the best order at or below its own quality, rather than into its own, gives me half as many qualifying flips again. Over half the above Normal ones pay better one or more rungs down. That share has come out just over half on every run I have done. It is not a rounding difference, it is the difference between a flip and a pass, and it costs you one extra look at the sell tab.

What the market pays on average

Here is the measurement this guide is built on. For every T6 to T8 item that moves at least ten units a day at the Black Market, I compared two averages over the same 7 days: what the Black Market paid for it, and what it traded for in each city. Net of the 4% tax, on 5,364 item and city pairs:

• the median pair pays 23%
• 39% of pairs pay 30% or more
• 12% pay 50% or more
• 18% are negative, meaning the city is simply dearer than Caerleon for that item

Those are smaller numbers than a flip list shows you, and that is the point. This is not what you make on a good catch, it is what the gap between the two markets is worth on average. A good catch is that, plus a mispriced listing on top.

Now the part that makes it worth learning rather than re-checking every morning. Take the pairs paying above 30% on the 7 day averages and look at them on the 30 day ones: 90% are still above 30%. Of the pairs below 30% on 7 days, only 7% climb above it on 30. The structure of this market is slow. Which items and which cities pay is something you can learn once and keep for weeks.

How to read it in game, free

Open the item in the marketplace and use the bookmark tab on the right edge to slide out the Order Book and the Market History. The history graph gives you price and traded volume over 24 hours, 7 days and 4 weeks, for the marketplace you are standing in.

That 7 day line is the same number I used above. Learn it on the twenty items you actually trade, compare it to what the Black Market pays for them, and you have the whole method. Everything else in this post is me doing that for eleven thousand items at once.

Effective tier, and the weight

Players say t9 for a 6.3 and for an 8.1 because they count effective tier, which is tier plus enchantment. Base item power is 700, plus 100 per tier above 4, plus 100 per enchantment level, so T6.3 and T8.1 both land at 1200. What separates them is the mastery multiplier, 1.10 at T6 against 1.20 at T8, so the gap only opens for a player with high mastery.

For flipping, the useful part is the price ladder at equal power. Normal quality, median price the Black Market actually paid, on both windows:

Look at the two columns before anything else: nothing moves by more than a percent between a week and a month. This ladder is not a snapshot, it is what the item is worth.

Now the part I had wrong when I first wrote this. I assumed the cheapest way to a given power was always the lowest base tier carrying the enchant, because that is what the current buy orders looked like on the day I checked. On the averages it is not true. The T8 is always the dearest, by a third to nearly two thirds, and that part holds. Below it, T6 and T7 swap depending on the rung: at effective 7 the T6.1 is cheapest by a third, at effective 8 and 9 the T7 is. So look the item up rather than assume the pattern, and be careful with anyone quoting this ladder off live orders, myself included.

One thing the table does not show: T6.1 moves about 67 units a day at the Black Market, more than anything else on that panel and roughly twenty times what the effective 9 combos do. Cheap and liquid is what makes it the boring reliable one.

I drop T4 and T5 from the sit, and this is where the averages say something a flip list never will. Same 7 day method, all five tiers, with the game's own item weights:

The margin column and the silver column point in opposite directions, and that is the whole argument. Low tier pays the better percentage, by a wide margin and consistently. High tier pays 35 times more silver per item and more than twice as much per kilo hauled.

So dropping T4 and T5 is not a claim that they are bad trades. It is a claim about your evening and your back. Ten to thirty items is a normal session on T6 to T8 and that is already 1 to 5 million, mostly boots and light armour, and a small mount carries it. To make the same silver on T4 you would need a bag full, which takes far longer to buy and needs a real hauling mount. If your bottleneck is capital rather than time, the low tiers are the better percentage and you should take it.

If you do want volume, the move is not a bigger bag on the night. It is to buy over several sessions, bank the stock in Brecilien, and plan one large haul later. That is a different activity from sitting at a market, with a different risk.

The map, and it is flatter than people say

Same 7 day method, split by where you buy. T6 to T8, net of 4%:

Brecilien leads, and it led on both windows and on every run I have done. But look at the size of the lead: it is a few points, not a different game. The five royals sit within four points of each other and swap places between the two windows.

I am pointing that out because the choice of city gets discussed as if it were the decision, and on these numbers it is close to the smallest lever you have. The tier you sit on moves the margin more. The quality order you sell into moves it more. Where you stand moves it by a few points. Pick Brecilien if you have no reason not to, and otherwise pick the market you enjoy standing in, because you are going to spend an evening there.

The floor, and the trip

Below roughly 25% gross I do not go, because deaths on the Caerleon run eat the difference across a night. With 39% of pairs paying 30% or better on the averages, taking 20 makes no sense.

Split the haul. Two runs of 30 beat one run of 60, because one bad gank costs half instead of everything. And visit the Black Market once at the start of the session, before you go sit anywhere. Its buy orders are what your whole evening is priced against.

The trip has its own guide already written by someone in this community and I am not going to rewrite it. Two free levers are worth knowing: the Avalonian roads instead of crossing red zones, and joining a city faction without flagging so you can travel alongside a bandit assault group. Neither is safe. Both change the odds.

One snapshot, for contrast

Everything above is averages. Here is one morning of live listings on the same method, purely so you can see what the two kinds of number look like side by side. City prices under 6 hours old, 30% net of 4%, T6 to T8: 547 lines qualified this morning, and pricing them with the sell down rule instead of their own quality is what took the count from 357 to 547.

Compare that to the 23% median on the averages. Neither is wrong. The live number is what a mispriced listing is worth on top of the structural gap, and it is why sitting at a market beats reading a table. It is also the number that will be different tomorrow, and that is why the rest of this post does not rest on it.

Where I could be wrong

• My city average is aggregated across qualities, while the Black Market prices each quality separately. That flatters the city side on items where the qualities are far apart, and it is the weakest number here.
• Public data carries no order depth, so a pair paying 30% on average can be one unit a day. I filter on ten units a day at the Black Market, which helps and does not fix it.
• Europe server. West and Asia will not have the same map.

How this was measured

One snapshot, one execution, every figure above out of the same run. The averages are the volume-weighted means the public database publishes over 7 and 30 days: on the Black Market side, the qualities weighted by how much each one trades, so it compares like with like against the city side, which is aggregated the same way. An item has to move at least ten units a day at the Black Market to appear at all. Tax is 4%, the Premium rate. Tier 6 to 8 unless a table says otherwise.

The one dated section uses standing sell orders instead: the cheapest listing in a city other than Caerleon, under 6 hours old, priced out into the best Black Market buy order at or below the quality bought, with that order seen within the last day.

Snapshot used: city prices built 30 July 2026 at 22:08 UTC, Black Market baseline at 21:05 UTC, one hour and three minutes apart. Both figures are published in the data itself, and reading them is the first thing the script prints. When the gap is wide, every margin in the run compares a fresh city price against a stale Black Market one, and nothing says so.

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