>>718936764
Amassing wealth in PoE is like a puzzle, and every league the puzzle changes. Some people achieve this through market speculation, others find interesting niches in the system to fill. Firstly, you have to understand that power in PoE is not DPS or damage mitigation, its divs per hour. Even in SSF its divs per hour. This is because all drops in PoE are extremely liquid. A ton of garbage drops can be turned into a a really good item, because the orb system offers a lot of modularity. Secondly, trading is not simply buying and selling items. It's paying attention to *why* and *how* those exchanges are taking place. Like you can whisper someone and ask them why they bought a shit jewel with a specific affix from you, and there's a pretty good chance they'll tell you, and its likely part of a scheme where they've discovered a niche and are just amassing an item and crafting it. Like here's a fairly recent and simple example.
https://youtu.be/Y5uLo74eNao
This guy is just crafting magic rings. Real simple, real easy. But someone has to do this to fill this specific niche, and the less people that know about it the more profitable it will be. People don't know where items come from so they pay more for this stuff than its worth. Now imagine you discovered a certain highly specific affix configuration on an end game wand base, and you just moved tons of those and made hundreds of divs per hour. You could do something like that, or something as stupid as combining essences. The game is full of all kinds of potential wacky schemes like that. Its a community wide effort to plug holes in the economy until it turns into a finely tuned optimized machine where you can get everything easily. Its really complex and interesting, and rewards having a lot of creativity and market awareness. Its all about balancing overhead and profit, and as you progress you conveniently get access to more and more tools to do this.

There's so much going on its hard to fully explain.