Flipping logs, ores and bars

Raw materials are the closest thing OSRS has to a commodity market. Supply is gathered by hand, demand comes from players training a different skill, and the price sits wherever those two crowds meet.

Coal trades over 44 million units a day. Gold ore does 21 million. Maple logs do nearly 14 million. Volumes like that put raw materials alongside runes as the most liquid corner of the Grand Exchange, and unlike runes, the prices here move in slow, wide arcs rather than sitting pinned to a level. That combination of deep books and real movement is why raw materials suit patient flippers as well as fast ones.

One category, three markets

Grouping logs, ores and bars together makes sense because they share a supply model: every unit was gathered by a player who could have been doing something else. That gives all three a soft floor. If a price falls far enough that cutting or mining is no longer worth the hour, gatherers switch activity and supply thins until the price recovers. It also gives them a soft ceiling, since a high price pulls gatherers back in.

What differs is the demand side, and that is where the three split apart. Logs are burned, fletched and turned into planks. Ores are smelted. Bars are smithed into finished goods or sold on by the smelting crowd. Each has its own buyer, its own peak hours and its own sensitivity to updates.

Logs

Log demand splits three ways. Firemaking burns them, Fletching turns them into bows, and the sawmill turns teak and mahogany into planks for Construction. Those uses have very different price tolerances, which is why the log market is not one ladder but several.

Yew logs at around 110 gp and magic logs at around 770 gp are the fletching and firemaking staples, and both trade in the millions daily. Mahogany logs at about 165 gp do over 11 million a day almost entirely because of Construction, which makes them the most update-sensitive log in the game: any change to Construction training, or to the cost of the sawmill, reprices them quickly. Maple logs at about 10 gp are the cheap bulk option, and their price has moved between roughly 5 and 13 gp recently, which is a very wide band in percentage terms for something so heavily traded.

Buy limits sit at 15,000 for the common free-to-play logs, 12,000 for yew and magic, and 11,000 to 13,000 for the tropical hardwoods. Because unit prices are low, funding a full limit is achievable on a modest bank, which makes logs one of the friendlier entries in this whole track for a player with under 10M.

One habit worth building with logs is to ask who the marginal buyer is before you take a position. Yew logs have two buyers, the fletcher and the firemaker, and they cap out at different prices, so yew tends to hold a floor even when one of those crowds goes quiet. Mahogany has effectively one buyer, the Construction trainer, so there is nothing underneath it if that crowd stops. Items with a single use are the ones that fall furthest when their use is nerfed, and logs make that lesson unusually easy to see.

Ores

Ore prices answer to smelting, and smelting in bulk mostly happens at the Blast Furnace. That gives the ore market a distinctive shape: demand arrives in concentrated sessions rather than being spread evenly, because players buy a large stock of ore, smelt for a couple of hours, and sell the bars.

Coal is the hinge of the entire market. It is an input to almost every bar above iron, it trades around 140 gp, and its daily volume dwarfs everything else in the category. If coal moves, every bar above it moves within hours. Iron ore sits near 70 gp, mithril near 156, gold ore near 152 with an unusually large 30,000 buy limit, and adamantite around 515.

Adamantite deserves a note of its own. Its four hour buy limit is 4,500, compared with 13,000 for mithril and iron, and runite carries the same 4,500. Those tighter limits are the game restraining the two ores that feed the most valuable bars, and they mean the ceiling on an adamantite flip is far lower than its volume would suggest. Always check the limit before you judge an ore by its trading activity.

Bars and the conversion

Bars are where the ore market becomes a finished-goods market. A steel bar trades around 570 gp, mithril near 980, adamantite near 1,890 and runite around 12,000, all with a 10,000 buy limit. Gold bars at roughly 88 gp are the outlier, since they exist mostly to feed Crafting.

The relationship worth understanding is the gap between the ores that make a bar and the bar itself. That gap is what a smelter earns for their time, and it is bounded by how good the experience is. When smelting a particular bar becomes the best experience rate, players pay up for the ore and accept a thinner gap on the bar, which squeezes the difference. When nobody is smelting, the gap widens until it is worth someone's while again.

The limits are wildly uneven

This category has the most inconsistent buy limits of any in the track, and that inconsistency is the single most common thing people get wrong here.

• 15,000 on common logs such as maple, oak and willow.
• 12,000 to 13,000 on yew, magic and teak logs, and on iron, coal and mithril ore.
• 11,000 on mahogany logs.
• 10,000 on every bar.
• 4,500 on adamantite and runite ore.
• 30,000 on gold ore.

A 30,000 limit on a 152 gp item and a 4,500 limit on a 515 gp item produce very different ceilings even when the percentage spread looks identical. The habit to build is to check the limit first and the percentage second.

A worked coal flip

Now the same exercise on magic logs, to show what happens further up the price ladder. Buy at 740 and sell at 790 and the tax is floor(0.02 × 790), or 15 gp, leaving 35 gp per log. A full 12,000 limit is 420,000 gp, but it costs 8.88M to fund, so the rate is about 4.7%. The magic logs flip pays four times the gold and needs five times the bank. Neither is better in the abstract. If you are slot-constrained rather than gold-constrained, take the bigger absolute number; if gold is what you are short of, coal is doing more work per coin.

What goes wrong

The first failure is treating a wide historical band as a range you can trade against. Mithril ore has traded between roughly 111 and 225 gp recently, and mahogany logs between 108 and 190. A price near the bottom of a band is not automatically cheap; sometimes the band is simply resetting to a new level because a supply method got easier. Buying the bottom of a falling market is the most expensive habit in this category.

The second is ignoring bots. Gathering skills are the most heavily automated part of the game, so raw material prices carry a permanent downward pressure that lifts abruptly whenever a ban wave lands. Those post-ban weeks are genuinely good for holders and painful for anyone who was short of stock.

The third is update exposure. Skilling updates land often and they hit this category hardest. A change to Wintertodt, to the sawmill, to the Blast Furnace, or to any popular gathering location reprices the affected item within a day. If you hold raw materials through a Wednesday, know what is in the notes.

The fourth is patience with the exit. Raw materials fill quickly at the going rate but they do not reward stubbornness. A sell offer parked 5% above the market on coal will sit there all evening while the price drifts underneath it, because there is always someone else with 13,000 units willing to take the going price. Set a target you would accept today, not one you would like in a week, and if the market moves against you, take the smaller win rather than holding a commodity position out of pride. That discipline matters more here than in any category with a scarcity story behind it.

Finding live flips

On the Margins board, the natural filter set is Buy price under 2,000 with a healthy Trades an hour floor, then a sort on Profit@Limit high to low. Profit@Limit is the right primary sort in this category precisely because the limits are so uneven: it does the multiplication for you and puts the 4,500-limit ores in their proper place next to the 15,000-limit logs. Add a second sort on ROI to break ties. Keeping the Limit column in view while you scan is a good habit here.

On the Flip Finder, raw materials show up well under both the Fast Fill and High Volume scans, since the deep books mean a large position can be filled without moving the price. Set your capital to what you would genuinely commit and let it size the position against the buy limit.

One extra check pays for itself in this category specifically. Because an ore and the bar it becomes are two prices in the same chain, the interesting question is usually which of the pair is currently the better trade, and that is easier to answer by looking at them together than one after the other. Compare puts two item pages side by side, prices, volume and range at once, which turns a judgement you were making from memory into one you are reading off a screen.

Next: food. Same skilling supply chain in many cases, but a demand engine that behaves quite differently, because food is consumed by dying.

Raw material pages to watch

Live prices, volume and buy limits for the items named above: Coal, Magic logs, Adamantite ore and Adamantite bar.

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