How to use Torn Exchange for trading - the right way

Table of content:

• Quick setup
• But what does this all mean?
• Setting up the price list
• Global actions
• Category actions
• Your Price List
• How to make a trade receipt
• How to do an actual trade
• List of additional features

 

 

Hi. I see dozens or even hundreds of young and old players that put up a price list on Torn Exchange (TE for short - https://tornexchange.com), but upon chatting them up I get a feeling that a lot of TE’s potential goes unnoticed. So this is a tutorial on how to do trading with TE - the right way.

 

First thing’s first: TE will always be free. All you need is a Limited Access API key and you’re good to go. Auto-updating is also free. No hidden fees.

 

That said, there is some effort put in the feature of having the ability to update prices throught the API, still contemplating whether this should be free too or not cause we all know how API resource usage can skyrocket and cause problems on the hardware.

 

Quick setup

This is the fast rundown on how to get set up in 1 minute:

• Log into TE with Limited Access API key

• Head on to https://tornexchange.com/edit_price_list and add margins or fixed prices to items you want to buy (to be explained later)

• In Settings (https://tornexchange.com/settings) set your description and link to forum post at the very minimum

• Choose your preferred method of creating receipts (web calculator / browser extension / PDA) - I’ll explain later why

• Head to your price list https://tornexchange.com/prices/yourname to check if everything’s fine

• Advertise and get rich

 

Just recently I stumbled upon this fantastic video from Wraith_Paradox [2453050] about trading, that talks in-depth about TE as well. It is from summer 2024 so lot's of features missing, but it really well explains the gist of it (from 18th minute onward):

 

 

Link to video

 

 

Now that you know the gist of it, it’s time to delve deeper because the saying goes: devil is in the details!

 

But what does this all mean?

Two main terms that always get mixed and not understood are TMV and TEMV. Let’s break it down:

• Torn Market Value (TMV): a value (or price) that Torn calculates every midnight for each item, saying what is this item’s market worth at that moment. What exactly goes into this formula, nobody knows (if you do, let me know!). This is also the famous green number that Torn Tools gives you when on a trade screen and this again is a source of confusion cause noobs think this is a price they have to get.

 

 

• TE Market Value (TEMV): for a trader, TMV is not enough, market can vary wildly through the day so we need something that will be calculated much more frequently. So there’s a script (actually it’s a cron job) on TE backend that runs every hour and re-calculates the market value for each item. This is the price your margin’s work off of, not off TMV! You can see from the pic TE displays both values for each item so that you have as many information available when modelling your prices

 

 

Note: TE updates its price (TEMV) every hour!

 

Setting up the price list

So first and foremost, you are creating a list of prices at which you will be BUYING items from customers. Some customers confuse this and think the price list is for selling.

 

After logging into the site, head on to https://tornexchange.com/edit_price_list and start adding prices to items that you want people to sell to you. Now there’s several things to unpack.

 

 

We already covered TMV and TEMV. Your Fixed Price is a price you want to put on items that do not fluctuate in value much. Typical example are Stat Enhancers, Donator Packs, sometimes weapons. 

 

You have to be careful here because it no time you can lose a lot of money. If you put a fixed price on some item and that item drops in value, you might be overpaying. 

 

That’s why there’s Profit Margin field which is usually your bread and butter, or fire & forget thingymagic. Why? You put a margin there (in percentage) and it will always follow TEMV through its ups and downs. I repeat - margin is subtracted from TEMV, not TMV!

 

In the end, there’s Effective Price, also called Trader’s Price, Buying Price or whatever floats your boat. It is a lowest of either Fixed Price or price calculated after Profit Margin on TEMV is calculated. This is a price that gets shown on your price list. To emphasis: this is the PRICE YOU BUY STUFF FOR (and not to sell them!).

 

Global actions

Top left there’s “Auto-fill profit margin”. If you use this, it will put a single margin to EVERY item known in Torn. I’d rather never do that. Golden rule: put prices and margins only for items you actually buy or can afford to buy.

 

Top right there’s an option to remove ALL prices from the price list. I also advise to never use this, do it only if you really want to start anew or quit.

 

The Checkbox

I know the UI sucks but bare with me. Checking the checkboxes in an item row deletes the listing. Don’t select anything if you don’t want to delete your entry.

 

Category actions

Then you have the option to auto-fill just a specific category. This is very useful to quickly put some good margin on categories that have a lot of items, like Clothes or Materials. Again, go through the items manually and remove any you don’t want to buy.

 

Pro Tip: if your networth is 3B, nobody will believe you that you’re buying Bread Knife for 5.5B. Be realistic and transparent.

 

On the right side of the category there’s option to remove all prices from category. This often comes in handy, just understand that clicking it will not automatically do it, you have to click Submit for any action to take effect.

 

Note: your price for certain item is called a listing. So you have thousand listings for thousand items. There’s a page that displays all listings from everyone that you can search for which trader gives the best price for certain item:

https://tornexchange.com/listings 

 

Your Price List

 

 

There’s a lot of stuff on your price list:

• Votes. Your customers (called sellers) can log into TE with their API key and vote for you to be trustworthy (or not)

• Status icon: tracks your idleness every 10 minutes, based on Torn API

• The title: it’s the same for everyone, you can’t change this text

• Description: can be changed in the Settings, Trader tab

• Buttons:

  • To your Torn profile

  • To your TornPal profile with much more information

  • Reviews: a forum thread where you advertise your business

  • Start Trade: classic shortcut to immediately trigger the trade

  • Trade Calculator: this is not seen by customer. Takes you to https://tornexchange.com/calculator 

  • Change Prices: click to edit your prices as discussed above

• Last trade: shows when was the last trade that trader made the receipt for. It is a good indicator of the activity. If a person has never made any trade you can be pretty sure that one is either a scammer or was never really trading

• Price list updated: this one’s the same info for everyone. It’s when updating script that sets TEMV, has run in the background

 

How to make a trade receipt

There’s one more thing you need to decide and that is - what software will you be using for making trade receipts? You have three options:

 

TE Calculator

Link: https://www.tornexchange.com/calculator

 

 

After confirming:

 

 

It’s this text from second log that you need to copy and paste into Calculator:

 

 

It will calculate the prices for you for each item in a trade. After that you need to Confirm and at that point trade receipt is generated - a page that lists all the items and all the price you asa trader paid the customer. It’s a receipt that you hand out to your customer, just like in a brick and mortar store.

 

Torn PDA

Link: https://github.com/Manuito83/torn-pda

 

TE support comes out of the box. You possibly need to enable it in the browser settings that is available only when you open in-app browser and navigate to the trade page.

 

Browser extension

Chromium-based: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/torn-exchange/iggcinpeofcbplffobefiojjgfeoblll

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/torn-exchange-2-0/ 

 

There’s one for Chrome (basically for all Chromium-based browser, which include Edge, Opera, Brave etc)  and one for Firefox.

 

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In all three ways, you have three options offered to you:

• Copy trade money (the one that you put in a trade)

• Copy trade receipt that tells your customer what did he sell and at what price did you buy each item

• Copy trade message that you have set up in Settings page

 

How to do an actual trade

So you’ve set up TE and first trade comes in, now what? The procedure is a bit different for each of three different softwares. Let’s break them down one by one.

 

Torn PDA

If a trade comes in and you’re on PDA, just navigate to the trade page first. Easiest if you have Trades as a shortcut on your homepage.

 

Then on a trade page, if you enabled TE calculator, you will see TE data pull down from top side. All you need to do now is copy trade value in a trade and possibly message the client.

Bam, trade done!

 

You cannot edit prices on PDA.

 

 

Browser extension

That’s my favorite way of trading, have done tens of thousands of trades that way. On trade screen, click the extension icon, click Submit and you’re done :) Same as with PDA; you have option to copy any of the three texts.

 

But there’s small caveat: if you click anywhere outside the extension popup, it will hide and you will have to do it all again, meaning it can generate unnecessary trade receipts. I know it’s a big shortcoming for a lot of people but my focus atm is more on the backend side. In any case, you can always delete surplus receipts in the Analytics page.

 

You can edit the prices before submitting.

 

 

TE Calculator

When you don’t have either of the above options, calculator on TE page itself will also do just fine. Copy the trade log, like so: “Duke added 900x Chamois Plushie to the trade.”, press Calculate and you will be presented with a list of items and your price for it, same as with extension.

 

Here you can also edit the prices before submitting.

 

List of additional features

• plushie and flower sets (flushies, for short): by default, when a customer puts same quantity of each flushie, TE can evaluate this as a set instead of individual flushies
• analytics: advanced analytics of sellers, profits, receipts...
• voting: each trader has votes next to their name. Each seller can vote
• Museum Helper: great tool with graphs to visual price history of all flushies: https://www.tornexchange.com/museum_helper
• Tutorial: each site on TE has a tutorial text. You can disable that in Settings
• Advertising Custom Services: TE is more than just trading platform, you can also advertise your custom services that do not fall under items or some Torn feature (like reviving): https://www.tornexchange.com/search_services/
• link to TornPal: each price list has a link to trader's TornPal profile where you can check a lot of public facts
• API: it's in its infancy but you can already export your full list of sellers or receipts into JSON or even CSV which you can import into an Excel or Google spreadsheet: https://www.tornexchange.com/api/
• Trader ranking: small feature to boost competitiveness, calculating number of trades each trader makes every month

 

And that’s it for now. Feel free to suggest what else I can add. Also, join our discord to follow announcements and submit any bugs that you might find but also suggestions on how to improve it: https://discord.gg/WTtUFBjB