Methodology
This page documents how GE IQ turns raw prices from the OSRS Wiki real-time pricing API into the numbers you see in the tool. Nothing here is proprietary; the whole point is that every figure should be reproducible from public inputs.
Data sources
- Prices, volumes, timestamps: the official RuneScape Wiki real-time pricing API, endpoints
/mapping,/latest,/5m,/1h,/timeseries. - Item icons and metadata: the OSRS Wiki.
- Update-impact data: the public osrs-update-impact-tracker repository.
GE IQ does not scrape private sources, does not use insider price feeds, and does not touch any data from inside your OSRS account.
Refresh cadence
The client polls the Wiki API roughly every two minutes. Volume aggregates over 5-minute and 1-hour windows are refreshed on the same cadence. A price you see in the tool is therefore never older than about two minutes, but it is also never more current than the Wiki API itself.
Prices used for a flip
In OSRS Wiki API terminology, high is the most recent insta-buy price and low is the most recent insta-sell price. In GE IQ that maps to:
- Buy at:
low. This is what someone was willing to sell for; you buy from them. - Sell at:
high. This is what someone was willing to buy for; you sell to them.
Margin (after tax)
GE IQ always reports the net margin after the 2% Grand Exchange tax, capped at 5,000,000 GP per item:
margin = high − low − min(floor(high × 0.02), 5,000,000)
An item with a non-positive margin is not shown as flippable.
ROI
ROI is the tax-aware margin divided by the buy price:
roi = (margin ÷ low) × 100%
Extreme ROI values usually indicate low-volume noise, not real opportunity. GE IQ excludes ROI above 60% from its top-flip rankings for that reason.
Volume and daily-volume estimate
Volume is the sum of insta-buy and insta-sell counts over a rolling window. The 5-minute and 1-hour figures come straight from the Wiki API. The "daily volume" figure is a simple projection (hourly volume × 24) used as an ordering hint; it is not a claim about tomorrow's real volume.
Flip grade A to F
Each item earns a flip confidence score from 0 to 100, which then maps to a letter grade. The score is the sum of five weighted parts, so no single number can carry a grade on its own:
- Safety (up to 30): a 1 to 10 risk score built from volume (40%), margin stability (30%), how many recent trades there are (20%) and a base, minus a penalty for suspiciously high ROI.
- Data quality (up to 20): how many trades happened in the last five minutes (50+ is high, 10+ medium, any is low).
- Margin stability (up to 20): how close the current margin is to the last hour's, so a one-off spike does not score like a steady margin.
- Liquidity (up to 15): a log scale of estimated daily volume.
- Profitability (up to 15): ROI, with roughly 2% to 15% the sweet spot; very high ROI scores lower, because it usually signals a thin, illiquid market.
The letter follows the total: A is 75+, B 60+, C 45+, D 30+, and F is below 30. An item needs a positive after-tax margin and some recent trades to be graded at all.
Because liquidity and stability carry real weight, a high-volume item with a small but steady margin (a common rune, say) can outrank a rare item with a huge but shaky one. A grade is a snapshot of how safe and tradeable a flip looks right now, not a prediction that it will pay off.
How accurate are the grades?
A grade is only worth trusting if higher grades really do behave better, so we backtested them against the Wiki's historical /timeseries data. We reconstructed the grade at roughly 40,000 past moments across the 600 most-traded items, then looked at the next 30 minutes and asked one strict question: could you actually have completed the flip? That means both sides kept trading, so you could buy and sell, and the margin stayed positive the whole time.
The grades lined up with reality, in order. The higher the grade, the more often a flip was still tradeable and profitable half an hour later:
| Grade | Moments tested | Still tradeable and profitable |
|---|---|---|
| A | ~19,000 | 47% |
| B | ~19,000 | 43% |
| C | ~2,700 | 37% |
| D | ~490 | 32% |
| F | ~40 | 20% |
Every step down the scale was less tradeable than the one above it, and an A grade was more than twice as completable as an F. A few honest caveats: this is a one-off snapshot from July 2026, not a live figure; it measures completability and margin persistence, which is exactly what the grade is built to reward, so part of the result is the grade confirming its own liquidity bias; and the F sample is small. It is evidence that the ordering holds, not a promise that any single flip will fill.
Flip score
Rankings inside the tool use a score that combines margin and volume:
score = margin × log(volume + 1)
The logarithm dampens huge volume figures so a rune with 200,000 daily trades does not dominate every top-10 list. Score is used for sitemap priority and for the "top flips" API endpoint.
Buy-limit-aware profit ceiling
Every item has a 4-hour buy limit set by Jagex. Profit per full cycle is margin × buy limit, and this is displayed alongside per-unit margin so a small-limit high-margin item can be compared to a large-limit low-margin item.
Stability signal
A margin that has held over several data points is more useful than one that just spiked. GE IQ compares the current margin to the previous hour's margin and flags items as stable, moderate, or volatile. This signal is descriptive only.
What GE IQ does not claim
- It does not claim any flip will be profitable. Prices move; the API can be delayed; buy offers can go unfilled.
- It does not predict future prices. Every figure is derived from public data available right now.
- It is not affiliated with Jagex Ltd. Trademarks belong to their respective owners.