Flipping With The Currency Exchange

Flipping With the Currency Exchange in Path of Exile 2 is your one stop shop for generating currency passively! Unlike other trades in Path of Exile 2, the Currency Exchange allows you to seamlessly buy from and sell to other players without the hassle of a ton of individual trades. This feature is accessed by talking to Alva in your hideout using your gold as a resource to measure the size of your trades. You unlock the Currency Exchange by completing the campaign.

While the Currency Exchange is initially just seen as a method to exchange goods for goods, there are a multitude of ways that you can use the Currency Exchange to generate currency. This can either be an active generation of currency, where you sit at the currency exchange, purchasing items to modify, to resell later, or just setting up passive exchanges to print money while you're mapping, eating or even while you are asleep!

This guide walks you through understanding how to use the Currency Exchange in a multitude of ways, to trade your way to riches as you progress your journey through the atlas!

Make sure you have lots of Gold, as flipping with the Currency Exchange can have incredibly high gold costs. Gold costs scale with both the quantity as well as the rarity of the items that you are exchanging, so be sure to look out for this!

The most basic form of generating profits with the Currency Exchange is through flipping. While it may seem complex initially, flipping using the Currency Exchange can essentially be explained with 'Sell A for B, buy back A for less B', and boils down to three basic steps:

• Research through multiple ratios to find a few that are profitable
• Test and narrow down a market with widespread trade for that resource
• Set up an exchange system for yourself!

While it can be hard to find profitable ratios with sizeable trading volume initially; as with everything else in Path of Exile 2, it gets easier over time. Here is an example of how to find a ratio, test its profitability and finally set up an exchange.

The first step is finding a ratio that suits you best. This includes looking through multiple different materials that are within your budget. Gauging your budget can be hard, you generally want to have at least a little bit of liquid currency to be able to purchase things such as mapping materials or maybe even an item that you see that you really want to pick up. Of course, you can also spend all your currency at once, however, this is not recommended as this can leave you stressed out, waiting for your exchanges to come through. Generally, good flips are a matter of patience, so choosing an amount of currency that is non-consequential to you is ideal.

Starting with finding a ratio, simply choose a currency in the 'I Want' and 'I Have' sections, and then proceed to hover over the Market Ratio. Use Divine Orbs or Exalted Orbs because they are commonly used as basic trading currencies. After choosing two resources, hover over the market ratio. This informs you of the available market ratios for that particular trade. Now, press your 'alt' key, while hovering the market ratios. This brings up a menu with the trades that you are competing with. What are competing trades? Simply put, these are the trades that you are competing with when you list your item. Other people trading in the exact manner you are.

In this example, people are currently buying 6.1 Neural Catalysts for 1 Exalted Orb. At the same time, people are buying 1 Exalted Orb for every 7.4 Neural Catalysts. This is a relatively good ratio, as you make around 1 Exalted Orb for every 6 Exalted Orbs that you invest!

Take advantage of these ratios, by 'scouting out' a price range where things sell fast, but not too fast, and you can buy things fast, but not too fast! If things sell almost instantly, you've likely priced your items too low, and if things don't sell at all over the course of a few hours, you've likely priced too high. To avoid this, scout out a range by posting in the opposite manner that the exchange rate implies. In this case, since people are buying 6.1 Neural Catalysts for 1 Exalted Orb and buying 1 Exalted Orb for every 7.4 Neural Catalysts, you want to do the opposite! Sell an Exalted Orb for 7.4 Neural Catalyst and buy back 1 Exalted Orb for every 6.1 Neural Catalyst. This leaves you with a profit of 1.3 Neural Catalyst after every Exalted Orb worth of exchange, meaning after approximately 6 Exalted Orbs worth of trades, you generate an extra Exalted Orb!

Usually, if a trade request is fulfilled within a few minutes of when you posted it, it is at a good ratio, however as you become more experienced, you can set up ratios that take longer to fulfill if you are going to be busy for a while doing something else, for example mapping or even sleeping! You can find a suitable arbitrage by slowly adjusting the ratios at which you are buying different materials at until you find a sweet spot for the time that it takes to fulfill your trade requests. As seen in the above images, while initially finding a successful ratio of buying Neural Catalyst at 7 to 1 Exalted Orb and selling 6.25 for an Exalted Orb, a newer more profitable ratio was found at 7.2 and 6 Catalysts per Exalted Orb respectively, increasing the profit margin from 0.75 to 1.2 Exalted Orb. While this may not seem like much, this is around 60% more profit. These sorts of minor tweaks to exchange ratios can result in massive increases to currency generation over a longer time period or when done on a larger scale.

An additional way to make even more profit out of Basic Flipping is to flip based on time of day. Often times, certain time zones have a difference in the supply/demand of certain materials and consumption of things fluctuates throughout the day. While this can be very volatile if you are uncertain of a particular market, with careful monitoring, it is possible to push your profit margins even further by paying attention to the times at which certain materials are more or less valuable throughout your day.

While the first method of basic flipping is good for generating currency because the Exchange ratio is displayed directly, the profitability is always somewhat limited due to the same reason. Most of the time, however, there is more currency to be made within larger markets using multi-exchange flipping.

Regular flipping boils down to:
- Sell A for B.
- Buy back A for less of B.

Multi-Exchange Flipping is:
- Sell A for B.
- Sell B for C.
- Convert C to A at a better ratio than you bought B with A at.

If this sounds complicated, do not worry, this guide walks you through the entire process and an example makes this a lot simpler to understand.

When buying and selling something in different currencies, typically they are bought in and sold in Exalted Orbs and Divine Orbs respectively. This is because people tend to pay extra for bulk items due to convenience, and due to Divine Orbs holding a higher value, they result in the ability to purchase a larger amount of goods. Due to this, as a rule of thumb for most (not ALL), things, buying in Exalted Orbs and selling in Divine Orbs yields a larger margin of profit.

This does come with one downside, however. Due to Divine Orbs being more valuable, the chances of people trading are slimmer due to having a smaller available market. A lot of people might need 20 or 40 Neural Catalysts and even if you post 500 of them, they can be bought out by separate individuals over a period of time, but there are not many people that need a massive bulk of something, such as 500 Neural Catalysts at once, which they buy with a single Divine Orb. For this exact reason, here, patience is key.

Just as with basic flipping, the first step here is to find a ratio that profitable. This example uses Exalted Orb, Divine Orbs and Neural Catalyst.

Neural Catalyst Vs Divine Orb

In this example, you can sell 560 Neural Catalysts for 1 Divine Orb. When you look at the Divine Orb to Exalted Orb ratio, one Divine Orb is worth 111 Exalted Orbs. Additionally, you can sell 6 Neural Catalysts for 1 Exalted Orb and buy 7 Neural Catalysts for 1 Exalted Orb.

While you can clearly see that there is a profit margin for buying and selling Neural Catalysts for Exalted Orbs, if you were to math it out to compare the exchange rates between just flipping in Exalted Orbs vs flipping with both Exalted Orbs and Divine Orb, you must first regulate the numbers by calculating using the ratio between Exalted Orbs and Divine Orb. You then use this ratio to accurately gauge the following steps to find the most profitable method of action:

• You can buy 777 Neural Catalysts for 111 Exalted Orbs at a 7:1 Ratio.
• You can sell 666 Neural Catalysts for 111 Exalted Orbs at a 6:1 Ratio.
• You can sell 560 Neural Catalysts for 1 Divine Orb, eventually converted to 111 Exalted Orbs at an approximate 5.04:1 Ratio.
• You can buy 560 Neural Catalysts for 1 Divine Orb eventually converted to 111 Exalted Orbs at an approximate 5.04:1 Ratio (Since there are no competing trades, you are forced to buy at market price. Alternatively you could try to buy more at a better ratio, but this may take a long while to accomplish)

By looking at these numbers, it is easy to say that the best option is to buy Neural Catalysts in Exalted Orbs and to sell them in Divine Orbs, as shown below.

Once there is a purchase request for the same currency with the correct ratio, your order fills. If there's no compatible open order you may need to wait a bit for the order to complete. In this case, 590 Neural Catalysts were purchased at a ratio of 6.94:1 and they were sold at 580 to 1 Divine Orb, which when converted to Exalted Orbs is a 5.22:1 ratio, much better than the selling ratio of raw Exalted Orbs, which was around 6:1. By selling in Divine Orbs instead of Exalted Orbs, the profit margin was increased from approximately 1 Neural Catalyst per trade, to nearly 2, almost double the profit!

As you can see, converting currencies and trading in multiple different materials can result in significantly larger profit margins. Although it may be complicated, this is part of the reason why its so incredibly profitable. It takes time to research and find profitable ratios, so the ratios that take longer to find usually yield the larger profit margins. As with most things, with enough time, even Multi-Exchange Flipping is something that can become natural.

Almost everything in Path of Exile 2 can be traded with other players, including the items listable on the currency exchange market. While direct trading is primarily used for things not listable on the Currency Exchange, you can use the direct trading option to avoid gold fees on half the component of your item flips. This does, however, come with the significant downside of requiring substantially more time and effort on your part, needing to message people and manually trade as opposed to creating listings and letting the system do the work.

Due to these exact reasons, Direct Trading into Exchange can be more profitable by a much wider margin in some cases, however, it's rare to find bulk offers outside of the exchange, which often results in you needing to do a large number of low volume trades.. It is highly recommended that before pursuing Direct Trading into Exchange, you verify that both your purchase method as well as your sale method (Direct Trades as well as your Exchange Ratios) are both solidified, due to the large amount of effort required.

The one exception to the above is using the trade website to exchange Exalted Orbs and Divine Orbs. Players often stock large amounts of both currency and the prices are generally stable between the Trade Website and the Currency Exchange. This is a great way to save on  Gold when flipping.

When handling different basic currencies in Path of Exile 2, some of them have the niche ability to be sacrificed via the Reforging Bench in your hideout in what is widely known as a '3 to 1 recipe.' These '3 to 1 recipes' sacrifice 3 of a certain material to produce 1 of another material of the same category, and can be an incredibly way to make currency when done on a mass scale. A prime example could be putting in 3 rare Breach Rings with bad mods to get back a new, unidentified Breach Ring with unknown modifiers.

With the 3 to 1 recipe explained, there are a few ways that this can be used for profit. Although 3 to 1 can be used with magic and rare items to gain new item bases, the 3 to 1 recipe can also be used on different types of crafting currencies. Depending on the type of currency, this can have different effects. For example, when concerning Distilled Emotions from Delirium such as a Distilled Ire, it always results in a Distilled Emotion one tier higher, in this case, a Distilled Guilt.

This method can have decent profitability due to having a reliable and known outcome. You can calculate the cost of your input, as well as the cost of your output, resulting in a good amount of measurable and safe profit.

Distilled Ires being Reforged

Another, less reliable and much more unsafe result of 3 to 1 Recipes can be to give you a random outcome. This is the case when reforging things such as Soul Cores (eg. Soul Core of Opiloti), Essences (eg. Essence of Flames), Runes (eg. Inspiration Rune) and more. In this case, if you were to sacrifice 3 Inspiration Runes inside the reforging bench, it could result in any other rune as an outcome. If you wish to see a full list of reforgable items, click here.

Often times, these outcomes are weighted, and due to the randomness of the results received after reforging, this method can be seen as being much closer to gambling, as opposed to flipping. If your sample size is small, this is gambling and you are just as likely to lose all your money as you are to make a profit. However, with enough capital (at least enough for 1000-2000 attempts, if not more), it is possible to create profit through this method. While this article does not outline a specific method due to the incredibly large scale required to produce consistent results with a method such as this, it is highly recommended that you watch the video below by Tenkiei and proceed with incredible caution if you decide to use this method.

Almost everything in Path of Exile 2 is tradable. The game has an asynchronous trading system in the Currency Exchange Market where you can use your Gold to list bulk currencies. Due to the way that fluctuating exchange systems work, the Path of Exile 2 Currency Exchange Market can be a great way to either passively or actively generate a large income through analysis and application, followed by patience over a long period of time to yield incredible amounts of profit, rarely matched through other methods.

Credits:

Written by: Void241
Content Reviewed by: Crouching_Tuna
Language Reviewed by: Tenkiei