Now that trading is almost non existant and to get souvenir drops you need to buy a "viewer pass" (which is low key gambling as you have to guess which team wins to get drops). How can you make profit on steam with almost nothing (or nothing)?

I plan to go through all the methods I know that you can use to make profit and atleast get a decent inventory while spending minimal time

I will also critique the methods to help you chose the one you want to use

This is one of the most obvious ones and has the least "risk" of all the methods.

Most of you already know how drops work but I will still go through it and explain it to those who don't

You get a guranteed drop every time you rank up once a week which comes from one of these collections;

• 2018 Inferno collection (Best)

• 2018 Nuke collection

• Bank collection

• Dust 2 collection

• Italy collection

• Lake collection

• Safe House collection

• Train collection

The most expensive drops you can get being from the Nuke Collection (worth 55$), and the inferno collection (worth a little shy of 100$)

You're not always guranteed a weapon skin drop though as you can get some irrelevant 0.03$ graffiti that doesn't even sell.

You can also get 2 random case drops per week, which are usually worth 0.03$ or a little more but there is always a chance to get a bravo case (which is worth around 15$ and still drops) or other cases which are worth a good amount. I'd reccomend waiting for a new case to come out and afk on special drop servers during the time where the case's price is the highest.

Overview: This is by far the easiest method but it does not gurantee huge profits and takes a long time, you are most likely to spend more money on electricity than what you get from drops.

This method needs a lot of explanation and understanding, I'll do my best to try to explain the basics and the rest will come from experience.

First up, there are a few essential things you need to know before getting into the market;

The first part is pricing, in my old guide I urged people to avoid using market prices and use cs.mоney for pricing instead - in this guide, I'm going to throw all that under the bus and tell you forget that. You're about to find out the best way of finding out the price and you do that by chosing an item and clicking "View on community market"
Then, pay attention to the buy orders


Buy orders tell you how "stable" the price of a skin is, the more buy orders there are and the less the gap between the prices is the more "stable" in price the skin is. This is important to know because it will help you pick a skin/item that you can make reliable profit with

The next and (final) thing you need to know is the sales history of an item and what it shows;

Every skin has a sales history if it ever sold, this shows you the density of sales and the peek/lows of an item, here is a music kit sales history example;

This shows exactly what you'd expect, the prices falling when a new music kit is released (EZ4ENCE), and recovery of the price once the hype of the new kit died down

This is NOT how a profitable or even a sellable item's sell history looks like, avoid items such as these;

Now with that knowledge in mind you can move on to making profit on market

Easiest and by far the most reliable way of making money by buying low an selling high are stickers, each time a tournament ends the player autograph stickers for that item are at an all time low which means its the best time to invest in these items in bulk and hold on to them for a couple of months and later sell them for a higher price

Another method is sniping items with nametags or gold/rare stickers listed close to buy order price and selling them on the market for a couple cents profit, most of these items take quite a while to sale but patience pay off most of the time, the only time it doesnt is when the stickers are scraped or the price of the skin are unstable

Buying souvenir items with kato 14 / dreamhack 14 stickers:
This requires A LOT of experience and I would reccomend that you'd rather not risk it if you have no idea what you are doing!
First you have to watch out for some things:

• Make sure the stickers are not scraped
  
• Make sure the skin the sticker on could be atleast traded, ie: it aint some worthless ash wood
  
• Be able to tell the value of each kato sticker and how well it goes on the market
  
• Dont even look at cs.money prices as they over value katos
  
• Dont directly panic buy, make sure its worth it
  
• Understand the difference between dreamhack 14 stickers and kato 14 stickers

Side note: it's been a year since I've wrote this guide prompt but I've never actually managed to finish it, as for now I'm working and studying so I never really find time, the knowledge I possessed while writing the guide and the ideas are now history. As for my personal opinion on this: work and invest, as in make your steam account your savings account so you can cash out later, invest in items such as gold payer autographs or cheap player autograph stickers that in time they will double in price. Speaking from experience; invest and forget, you'd be very tempted to cash out early or to trade your items for something better, list the stickers for a high price and check back months later and you will see how much difference there is and you won't be tempted by the reaction of the market.

Me being an idiot I always and always will be, decided that the best way to test my own theories is by going head first and finding out whether or not using your steam account as savings account and investing is a really good idea.. is it? I guess there is only one way to find out.
400 AED (roughly 109$ invested into steam funds), all to be spent on gold stickers (buying them on the market for around 9-11$ each hoping to sell them for 20-30$ in a month or so.

It's an experiment and it should be treated like one, n = 1 and that variable is me, the idiot (or a genius in disguise; time will tell) as the prices progress I'll keep on updating this guide. My calculations say that in around 1 year with just investing I should be hovering around 1300$ or so, but considering the fact that impulsiveness and outright mindless actions might take place, everything is account for with the lower bound being around 300 (if I'm extra stupid) or 2000$ by the next to next major (if everything is done absolutely perfectly. Just strap in and enjoy the show ;)

Start date: Jan 24th 2021

3 fu***ng days, 3 mf days and it already almost all went to hell through impulsiveness, though I wouldn't complain about the 5$ profit