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This is the first iteration of a new Newbie Guide to Investing in CSGO, covering most basic issues. Some subjects are in the work and will be added at a later date.
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Before we start, THIS is a fantastic overview of CSGO Market History (until April 2019) and a must-have, including timeframes for regular and operation drops, many important events and lots of useful info, made by steamfrag

Which items can be invested in?

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Introductionary Note: Discontinued consumables (cases, stickers and basically all containers) are better items for long term investment than non-consumables, since consumables get deleted from the market when used, thus reducing their quantity over time, unlike skins which are only deleted if a user gets banned or if the skins are used in trade-up contracts. Specific skins/knives/gloves could be profitable to invest and to hold long term, if you know exactly what you are doing. But generally skins are better suited for frequent trading and not long term investing, or if you want skins to play with and more or less hold their value with some potential to go up in price. As an example, Here is a video from TDM HeyJesus from last year explaining what I mean. If you are more interested in trading with others, nice knives and gloves, etc. and not mid/long term investing, visit /GlobalOffensiveTrade
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• Discontinued Cases: You could buy 3 cent cases (or less, depending on your currency from steam market, or 1 to 2 cents from cashout sites) when they get discontinued from the active drop pool and are moved to rare drops. This usually happens when a new case is released, the oldest case from active drop pool moves to rare drops. Active drop pool usually consists of 5 cases. Be aware that cases with high volume on market will take a very long time to rise in price. You could also invest in cases at a later time, for instance after few years of being 3 cents, lower quantities on market and upwards price trend, you could jump in or even at an earlier stage when they are still as active drop but anticipated to be the next case to move to rare drops, if you're in it for the very long haul, and if you can get the cases for extremely cheap prices in bulk (1 cent or less). Some cases are much older and/or rarer than others and therefore cost more, for example Operation Bravo case. Sometimes unexpected things happen with cases, for instance Valve decided to make the Hydra Case a rare drop as soon as Operation Hydra ended, even though most people were expecting the Hydra Case to become a common drop after end of the operation and to become 3 cents for a long time. Instead, they went up in price very quickly and very high. So if you invested in hydra cases during the end of operation for 10 cents, you could have made a lot of money by now. But note that the more cases are released, the more options case openers have to chose from. Therefore the rise in price of cases might slow down during time and take longer, as more and more cases are released. This can only be countered by increasing number of players and case openers (natural demand). Last but not least, the popularity and prices of the skins in the cases will influence the price development of discontinued cases (and vice versa).
• UPDATE: Lately Valve has done some weird things like dropping a large number of older cases such as Shadow cases, Chroma 2 cases, etc. for non prime accounts. So the old system isn't that reliable anymore

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List of all CSGO Cases in Chronological Order:
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Case Name	Release Date	Rare or Active Drop
CSGO Weapon Case	14. August 2013	Confirmed Rare
eSports 2013 Case	14. August 2013	Confirmed Rare
Operation Bravo Case	19. September 2013	Confirmed Rare
CSGO Weapon Case 2	08. November 2013	Confirmed Rare
eSports 2013 Winter Case	18. December 2013	Confirmed Rare
Winter Offensive Weapon Case	18. December 2013	Confirmed Rare
CSGO Weapon Case 3	12. February 2014	Confirmed Rare
Operation Phoenix Weapon Case	20. February 2014	Confirmed Rare
Huntsman Weapon Case	01. May 2014	Confirmed Rare
Operation Breakout Weapon Case	01. July 2014	Confirmed Rare
eSports 2014 Summer Case	10. July 2014	Confirmed Rare
Operation Vanguard Weapon Case	11. November 2014	Confirmed Rare
Chroma Case	08. January 2015	Confirmed Rare
Chroma 2 Case	15. April 2015	Confirmed Rare
Falchion Case	26. May 2015	Confirmed Rare
Shadow Case	17. September 2015	Confirmed Rare
Revolver Case	08. December 2015	Confirmed Rare
Operation Wildfire Case	17. February 2016	Confirmed Rare
Chroma 3 Case	20. April 2016	Confirmed Rare
Gamma Case	15. June 2016	Confirmed Rare
Gamma 2 Case	18. August 2016	Confirmed Rare
Glove Case	28. November 2016	Confirmed Rare
Spectrum Case	15. March 2017	Confirmed Rare
Operation Hydra Case	23. May 2017	Confirmed Rare
Spectrum 2 Case	14. September 2017	Active
Clutch Case	15. February 2018	Active
Horizon Case	02. August 2018	Possibly Rare (needs more data)
Danger Zone Case	06. December 2018	Active
Prisma Case	13. March 2019	Active
CS20 Case	18. October 2019	Active
Shattered Web Case	19. November 2019	Active

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• CSGO Major Stickers and Sticker Capsules: Usually at the end of each Tournament, Valve offers a sticker sale (between 50% and 75% off normal price) in-game store. You could buy stickers and capsules during that sale and either sell shortly after the sale ends, for a small quick profit (not guarantied but happened almost every time till now), or wait longer (usually over a year) for a possibly much larger profit. For instance if you bought Atlanta Legend Capsules 2 years ago, you would have 20x your money as of today! As more tournaments are being held and more stickers are released, it is difficult for most stickers to distinguish themselves among the huge mass of other stickers. Only invest and hold on to stickers that you think are promising. The profit from stickers depends on how nice they look, how popular they are, how well the teams perform in the future and how many people invested in them (basically a combination of all these factors). Sometimes teams disband, players quit or become successful, teams/players get banned, etc. which sometimes drive up the price of the related stickers.

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• Operation Pass: Sold by Valve in-game in order to get access to an operation. After the operation, all it does is give you access to a coin which you can display (which some players like to collect). You can buy passes during operation (or possibly during a sale of the pass at the end of the operation) then hold on to them and sell at a later date. There were few exceptional circumstances such as Vanguard pass which sold well as it didn't reach as low a discount as people were expecting and wasn't on sale for a long time, so not many were bought. Furthermore, Valve stopped selling the Vanguard Pass before the operation ended, which caused players who wanted to complete the missions to buy it from the market. Similar things happened to the Wildfire Pass. The Wildfire pass didn't even go on sale which caused its price to tripple in a single day when it got removed, then rose in price even more during time.

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• Viewer Pass: Introduced with the Katowice 2019 Major, a Viewer Pass was a purchasable in-game item which gave purchasers exclusive access to an upgradeable Event Coin, Souvenir Packages, The Major Pick'Em Challenge and Unlimited team graffiti for the duration of the Major. Similar to Operation Pass, all it does now is to give you a collectible coin. The Katowice 2019 Viewer Pass went on sale for 50% for few days during the last days of the major (before the sticker sale!). Some people bought them at 50% off but some people were expecting it to become even cheaper during the sticker sale (75% off), which didn't happen, instead it got removed, thus causing those investors to panic buy. I expect that Valve will use the Viewer Pass System in the next majors too (speculative opinion), as it was probably a big financial success and a lot of passes were sold in addition to a lot of major stickers.

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• Souvenir Packages: Drops in matches during majors. Research the different packages and their skins. Cobblestone is the most desirable due to the very desired and expensive Souvenir Dragon Lore. Also Cobblestone was removed from the map pool and replaced by Dust 2 in April 2018 and was not available in London 2018 and Katowice 2019 majors, thus increasing its price even more. Recently Vertigo replaced Cobblestone in March 2019. During the tournaments, the supply of souvenir packages will obviously be the highest, but also the interest in them is the highest. Try to buy them as cheap as possible and simply wait. Generating profit with souvenir packages might be a very slow process depending on the souvenir packages you have and the volume which was dropped in the majors. Note: as of Katowice 2019 major, only Viewer Pass owners were eligable to receive Souvenir Packages and Souvenir Packages no longer dropped during matches, but Pass owners could chose a match of their choice and get the Souvenir Package for it. This caused an equilibrium in prices, since most people chose the popular new 2018 Nuke and Inferno packages and the Overpass Package, causing their quantities to be much higher than other less popular packages in the major.

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• Sticker Capsules 1 and 2 and Community Sticker Capsule: These capsules were common drop for a long time, opened with sticker capsule keys and pretty much worthless (just like cheap cases), then they got discontinued and rose to high prices reaching a peak in May 2016. Probably with a June 2016 patch, they became rare drops which increased their quantity and crashed their prices (combined with the inevitable crash after the crown foil hype). However, after an initial crash they slowly rose in price again and sticker capsule 2 is at its all time high right now (as of May 2019). I assume its also just a hype correlated to the now second Crown Foil sticker hype which could crash back again. At these price levels, invest very cautiously. Also look at specific stickers in these capsules, such as Flammable foil, headhunter, crown foil, etc. At the right prices, these might be interesting items.

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• Gift Packages: Around christmas time Valve sold gift packages for $1. If you open a gift package on a server, it awards a random player a random regular skin drop. In the past players who opened the most packages were displayed on a leader-board in the beginning of every game of every Valve NA CSGO server. This has been exploited for advertising. In 2013, people didn't anticipate that the Gift Packages are limited to the Winter months and in the following year, CSGO exploded in popularity. This multiplied the price of these packages until they were sold again in 2014. In 2014, many people expected the same thing to happen, so the supply of Gift Packages increased. CSGO exploded again, but this time the price of gift packages increased much more because gambling sites started to boom and they competed for advertising. Fast forwards, Valve eventually removed the leaderboard feature a long time ago. For a long time gift packages were even below the in-game price. Recently though (since around end of 2018) the supply seams to dry up slowly and the price is climbing again (this time probably due to natural demand from people who actually just want to gift). We can see a similar trend with pallet of presents (which gives up to nine people in the user's match a random item). There is also the Audience Participation Parcel which drops up to 25 gifts randomly to viewers, but this item hasn't done anything interesting price wise yet.

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• Skins from Cases: Unlikely to be more profitable than consumables and it is more risky, unless you really know what you're doing. Sometimes Valve changes the design or details of a skin, which could also affect the prices. Also nerfs and buffs for a specific weapon tend to change the prices of skins for that gun (depending on how severe the buff/nerf is), for instance the AUG skins experienced a rise in price after Valve lowered the price (in game!) to $3.150 in Oct. 2018 and pro players used the AUG in the major. Skins which are used as trade up fodder tend to go up in price, whenever a new case or collection is released. There are a lot of other factors which determine the price development of skins which can't be all covered here

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• Skins from Collections Exclusive to Operations: skins which only drop during operations tend to rise when the operations end. However, the more operations they have been through, the higher the total supply on market and thus the longer it usually takes for them to go up in price during the breaks between operations. The following collections were dropped during the last 3 Operations (Bloodhound, Wildfire and Hydra). Operation Hydra was the last operation we had and it did end on November 13, 2017, which is more than a year ago! Note that these skins only dropped for those who owned the operation pass for the operation. Those who didn't own the pass, got their drops from the regular active collections.

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1. The Cache Collection
2. The Chop Shop Collection
3. The Cobblestone Collection
4. The Gods and Monsters Collection
5. The Overpass Collection
6. The Rising Sun Collection

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• The Danger Zone Collection: the Danger Zone Collection was basically just one skin, the MP5 Lab Rats. Players could get the skin by reaching Prime Status after CSGO went F2P in December 2018. The skin was available for a few weeks. A lot of the CSGO playerbase got the skin, which makes it a questionable investment since there are probably a LOT out there and the gun/skin isn't that popular. Could be a long term investment nonetheless, if you start to see quantities lowering over time and some stable price action.

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• Skins from Inactive or Retired Collections: The following collections are either inactive for now or completely retired. But some of them could be reintroduced in the future.

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1. The Assault Collection
2. The Aztec Collection
3. The Baggage Collection
4. The Dust Collection
5. The Inferno Collection (The Old One)
6. The Militia Collection
7. The Mirage Collection
8. The Nuke Collection (The Old One)
9. The Office Collection
10. The Vertigo Collection

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• Skins from Active Collections: The following collections are current active collections which drop skins in-game. Usually It is not recommanded to invest in any active collections (though some old skins which are suitable as fodder for certain trade-ups see occasional spikes whenever new cases and collections are released). Also the new Nuke and Inferno Collections are popular and people use skins from them to trade-up to better skins of these collections.

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1. The 2018 Inferno Collection
2. The 2018 Nuke Collection
3. The Bank Collection
4. The Dust 2 Collection
5. The Italy Collection
6. The Lake Collection
7. The Safehouse Collection
8. The Train Collection

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• Knives: If you know what you're doing and are familiar with patterns, etc. you can make some profit. But as mentioned knives are better suited for frequent trading and simply as play skins, even though some knives like the Butterfly Knife experienced significant price rise in the past, it is usually not a good idea to use knives as investment items. For instance the same amount of money you paid for a knife 3 years ago spent in specific stickers, would have generated much more profit in the same timeframe.

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• Gloves: see knives

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• Graffitis: Since Valve offered free graffiti for the duration of the major (since Katowice 2019 major and now in Berlin 2019 major), but none for sale, it is an option to invest in all previous major graffitis. The quantities for some old team graffitis could go down significantly and thus increase the price (which it has already done).

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• CSGO Keys: CSGO keys have a fixed price in game of $2.50 and are used as currency amoung traders, and of course to open cases. Investing in keys is pointless, unless you want to park your money, or trade or cashout, or unless you can buy keys at a cheaper rate than one normally could (currency issues). There is a special situation going on with the Hydra key which crashed significantly in price after the Operation Hydra Case became a rare drop and became an expensive case. There are different opinions as how the Hydra Key price will develop in the future. Some say it will crash even more, some say it will more or less stablize at the current price levels (1 Euro), others even invest in it right now and say the price will go up again, as soon as the old supply is dried out. For this guide, I remain neutral and leave it up to you to make up your own mind about this specific key. Note: currently this key is not accepted by most traders. There are other keys tied to expensive cases such as Winter Offensive keys which are also not accepted by many traders, though they are low in supply and thus still hold a stable price on market.
• IMPORTANT KEY UPDATE: Valve made newly bought keys in shop non marketable and non tradable as of Nov. 2019. Older existing keys are not affected and can still be traded and listed on steam market. Read more here https://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/2019/10/26113/

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• Banned/Removed Skins:

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1. M4A4 Howl (removed due to copyright violation) - The only Contraband item in CSGO
2. Dual Berettas Retribution (removed due to artist ban)
3. P90 Desert Warfare (removed due to artist ban)
4. CZ75-Auto Poison Dart (removed due to artist ban)
5. MAC-10 Curse (removed due to artist ban)
6. USP-S Orion (removed due to artist ban)

Note: Some skins were banned from a case, but can be traded up to with trade-up contracts
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• Banned/Removed Stickers:

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1. Sticker Howling Dawn (removed due to copyright violation)
2. Sticker King on the Field (removed due to artist ban)
3. Sticker Winged Defuser (removed due to artist ban)
4. Sticker Harp of War (Holo) (removed due to artist ban)

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• Removed and Reintroduced Stickers: there were a lot of other old stickers which were offered in the in-game shop of Valve and which were discontinued in the past and went up in price really high, but were reintroduced in 2016 to the in-game shop and remained there till today as random coupon offers, which caused their price crash back to around 1 Euro for normal stickers (more for the holos/foils). These sticker were the community series stickers (1,2,3,4 and 5) and the Halloween 2014 series. It is an option to buy these stickers in-game whenever you get a coupon offer and hope that some day they will be removed again, but this is a gamble. Also since these were available for a fixed price for so long in the shop, some investors might have had the same idea and stocked up on them. And the quantities might be too high for significant gains in the future. Also most of them aren't that popular anymore.

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• Current in-game Coupon Offers: each player has a coupon offer section with 4 slots with some items (sticker capsules, music kits, pin capsules, single stickers) offered. You could buy these items in-game and hold with the idea that at some point some of these items might get removed, but this is a gamble and impossible to predict and pretty much dead money until something happens. Note that whenever you buy an item from this section, the slot which you bought the item gets automatically refilled with another offer. This was not always the case. In the past after you bought all your 4 offers, you had to wait for new offers. But Valve always comes up with new ideas to make bank.

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• StatTrak™ Swap Tool: these tools are sold as a 2-pack in-game for a fixed price. People bought this, used one and sold the other one on the market. For the longest time these tools were around 10 cents on steam market which is quite a big difference to what they logically should be (half the price you pay in game). Recently they have gone up in price and reached that level. So right now, its pointless to do anything with them. If they ever go back down to those previous lows, you might want to consider them if you can get them very cheap. But keep in mind that there is max. cap of what they can rise up to obviously, and that there are better investment options out there

Other ways to profit on the market than long/mid term investing

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• Flipping Items in Coupon Section from in-game Store: You could buy stickers, sticker capsules, pins capsules and music kits when you get a coupon offer in-game. Check the price on steam market and if the price you pay in-game + steam tax is still lower than the lowest steam market price, then simply buy in-game and instantly sell on steam market for few cents quick profit. Mostly there is no or just a few cents to be made, but sometimes some offers give you better instant profit. Note: with the introduction of the EZ4ENCE music kits, Valve added a "new releases" category, which enabled users to buy as many of these music kits as they wanted as long as these were sold in this category. This means that potential investors could have stocked up on these items.

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• Trade-up Contracts: Determine if a certain skin can be traded up to profitably (consider Steam tax). If so, buy the lower level skins (either through buy orders at steam market, external cashout sites, or trading sites), and sell the traded-up skin on the market until it becomes unprofitable. This is already being done by bots and many other users. Note that the float value of the traded-up-to weapon is a function of the average float value of the traded-up-from skins. For more information and good trade-up contracts, visit the youtube channel of TDM Heyzeus. But remember that whenever a video is posted, a lot of people copy and paste the trade-ups shown in the videos making them unprofitable instantly, so it might be wise to revisit older trade-ups or come up with your own trade-up ideas. Use the trade-up calculator of csgo exchange to double check. Remember to switch the formula to calculate odds to new theory "based on outcome" (the old theory was incorrect).

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• Wide Daily Seasonality: Some items peak every day at around noon and tank after midnight (EST). If the difference tends to offset the Steam tax (15%), it can be taken advantage of. Usually, this requires a large volume to be reasonably profitable. If you engage in this technique, keep in mind that there is a scalability limit for the profitability.

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• Expansion and Contraction: After a popular game/operation/case/tournament/Steam-sale/market-bug is introduced, players try to dump their items on the market to buy whatever is hot. At the same time, buyers tend to also go for what's hot. Old investment supplies increase, and demand lessens. It is usually wise to do the opposite of the general market behavior and buy on these market crashes. When you want to sell something, it's usually best to wait until the market has fully recovered. Further, during some crashes, it might be better to wait until the end to buy-in as many investors try to buy in early.

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• Tournament Sticker Capsule Opening Arbitrage: During a period of time of some Major sticker sales, it was profitable to buy capsules from the market, open them, and then resell the stickers on the market (in the average case). Examine the EV carefully.

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• Wide Bid/Ask Spreads: take advantage if the daily bid/ask spread is larger than the Valve tax. Buy commodities that are being demanded at a much lower price than they are being listed at, then sell them back. Don't do this en masse before an expected downturn.

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• Grinding Weekly Drops: When a new case is released it can be worthwhile to accumulate in-game time in order to get the new highly-priced case.

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• Hunting for sub-variations of items: Some items on various markets have specific sub-patterns/properties that are more valuable than the usual ones (ex., 5-7 Case Hardened blue pattern and other desired knive patterns, specific signature Souvenir Packages, skins with expensive stickers, etc.) and they are sometimes undervalued (especially during market downturns).

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• Currency Arbitrage: If a particular conversion is highly skewed and Valve's adjustment is slow, it can become profitable for users in a certain country to buy items in the store or Community Market and resell them off the community market to another country. Note that using VPN to fake your place of residency is against Valve TOS and bannable

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• Listing High, Hoping for a Market Bug: List items for a higher price than their market value and hope that a Steam bug will occur where sellers temporarily won't be able to create new listings, while buyers can still buy the items, or hope that someone decides to buy heavily in one of your items and buys a lot at once

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FAQ

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How many items can I hold in my inventory?
Officially, 1000. You can list excess items on the steam market (for high unrealistic prices) and basically use the steam market as extra space. Note that the price of your listed items on market + your steam wallet cannot exceed $2000 at any given time. You can increase the number of items in your inventory and the amount of steam wallet money through some tricks. It is however recommanded that instead you simply make extra accounts and prepare them for usage as extra space and as storage accounts, if you need more space.
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How much is the Tax/Fee on Steam Community Market?
Approx. 13%-15% total for most.
Here is one in Euro by donbernie and Here is one for items under $1 by HwanZike
Yes, if you want to make Gaben really happy, sell for 3 cents and give him 2
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What are some real-money marketplaces for CSGO items?
Use all external sites at your own risk

• www.bitskins.com (UPDATE: Bitskins seams to have new owners since Oct 2019, though still unknown who they are and how the site will develop from here)
• www.skinbaron.de
• www.skinbay.com
• cs.deals
• lootbear

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I've personally used skinbaron and skinbay and had no problems so far. There are others out there like cs deals. Update (Oct 2019): I used Bitskins before they changed ownership in Oct. 2019. I am waiting to see who the new owners are (still unknown) and how the site develops, before using them again.
Also note that the most popular one, OPSkins was BANNED by Valve in 2018. Do not use OPSkins if you want to cash out from or cash in to Steam anymore. Their so called VGO Skins aren't actual CSGO skins, even though they look similar. Update (Oct. 2019): OPSkins apparently made a comeback with a P2P system without using Bots. Proceed with caution, because Valve basically sent them a cease and desist letter in the past letting them know that they aren't allowed to be associated with CSGO and use any intellectual property of Valve on their websites at all anymore.
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What is the most efficient way to cash out?
Sell the items directly at Bitskins, Skinbaron or another trustworthy site. Depending on the items, this can take a while. As an alternative you can exchange your investments into liquid items (popular skins for frequently used weapons, certain knives, case keys, sticker keys, nametags etc. - spend some time to determine which item gives you the best rate) and sell those liquid items on external cashout sites. The latter method will increase the speed at which you get money but will lose you a larger percentage. Keep in mind that BitSkins/Skinbaron take a percentage (5% to 15%), Paypal takes a percentage (~2%), and that the item values on external sites (real money value) are always lower than in the Steam Community Market. Also, every transaction on the Steam Community Market takes away 15% already. Occasionally the items on external sites are so cheap compared to SCM that it becomes worth it to sell them on SCM instead, buy keys from the in-game store, and then sell those keys on external sites again. When selling on SCM it almost always is correct to sell with an order that's higher than the highest buy order and higher than the lowest sell order if the lowest sell order is lower than recent trends display.
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What is the most efficient way to buy in?
Buy items (not necessarily CSGO only) from trustworthy external cashout sites or from highly reputable sellers with high cash rep if they offer a better deal (you can find some on /GlobalOffensiveTrade) and sell the items on the Steam Community Market. Spend some time to determine which item gives you the best discount compared to Steam Market Price. Be aware that some items such as souvenir skins, certain Stattrak knives, etc. might have a very high discount, but are very very hard to resell back on steam market, avoid these items and stick to popular items. There is a reason why they have such a high discount. Also be aware that some items might be manipulated on steam market, thus showing a very high discount on 3rd party sites when compared, avoid these items and check their market history to be sure. http://csgo.steamanalyst.com/hotdeals is one of the tools that can help you with good deals, or the deals section at BitSkins. The general rule is also the cheaper the items, the higher the possible discount. For instance you could buy very cheap stickers for sometimes 50% off, and resell on steam market. But the downside is that it takes a lot of time and effort than a single expensive item, but gives you more steam wallet money at the end. Make sure that after steam tax, you always get more money than if you deposit the money directly to Steam, otherwise this whole process becomes completely pointless.
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What are the case opening odds?
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	Normal	StatTrak
Knives and Gloves	0.26%	0.026%
Covert	0.64%	0.064%
Classified	3.20%	0.32%
Restricted	15.98%	1.598%
Mil-Spec	79.92%	7.992%

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Why did item X increase/decrease in price?
Possible reasons: CS:GO updates/balance changes/game changes/market changes (e.g., Tradeup Contract), new cases/operations (both short-term, due to opening frenzies, and long-term, due to increased supplies of skins), a famous streameyoutuber hypes an item, someone tries to manipulate the market, a AAA game is released, a tournament is taking place (CS:GO, DOta 2 etc.), a Steam-sale like Summer sale is going on, a market-bug is ongoing, the ingame drop rate was increased/decreased, legal issues about things related to the CSGO market (e.g., betting/gambling), etc.
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If I create a new Steam account, how do I transfer items to that account? How long does this take?
Create a new account, log in (via the thick client), set up your profile, enable Steam Guard, wait 15 days, and transfer the items to the account from your main (double check that it is your account). If you intend to use the thin client (e.g., via Chrome), make sure that you log in from there as well because Steam will impose a 7 day trade restriction on your account when you attempt to create a new transaction from a new device (a device meaning a new browser). Also, if you do not have mobile authentication enabled on the alt account, there will be a 3 day delay for trades. You can use the same phone number & email address for many Steam accounts. Also, Gmail forwards emails addressed to your account even if dots (.) are added in between the username characters of your email address.
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If I create a new Steam account, how do I use the Community Market? How long does this take?
Same steps as above, but you need to purchase a game that costs at least $5 or deposit $5 into your Steam wallet (and wait a month) before being able to use the Community Market. Keep in mind that using a new payment method will trigger a weeklong community market cooldown on your account.
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After buying a CSGO item from the Steam Community Market, how long do I have to wait until I can sell/trade it?
They are sellable immediately on the Market. You need to wait 7 days until you can trade them to another account. Note that items from some other games, have the 7 days cool down both for trading AND steam market (like Rust).
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How do buy orders work?
When you place a buy order, the market first looks for all the cheapest items that can fulfill your order. Then the oldest listing (i.e. the seller who has waited the longest) is selected and purchased. If the items are listed in multiple currencies, the amounts are first converted into your currency before being selected (i.e. a 0.03 RUB listing has no priority over a 0.03 USD listing). If multiple buy orders satisfy a new market listing, the oldest matching buy order will be selected. It used to be different in the past, but was changed in 2017.
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How do I create multiple listings at once on Steam Market?
You could use one the addons listed in the "useful sites and tools" section of this guide down below. The current most secure way (since no external extensions are used) is a solution suggested by u/soldture . Simply copy this link: https://steamcommunity.com/market/multisell?appid=730&contextid=2&items[]=Falchion%20Case
Change Falchion%20Case to your desired item name. This solution only works with commodity items. This also works with other games (you have to change the appid and replace it with the appid of that game, for instance Rust is 440.
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Item X hyped and is going to moon. Should I Buy?
Usually parabolic moves are followed by a crash (not always but most of the time). It is almost never a good idea to buy when something is mooning because of a video, some news, manipulation, mass hysteria and hype or whatever else. Buy the rumour, sell the news.
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Item X is crashing hard. The Market is crashing. I am shaking and panicking. Should I Sell?
Stay calm, take a deep breath and find out what is really going on and what you really think about it. As an example: there was a huge panic when gambling sites were being banned. Many people panicked and sold their items for ridiculously low prices. People were telling eachother that the skin market will crash and never recover if there is no gambling and the world is going to end. And here we are in 2019, and almost everything (including skins) is at its all time high. However, sometimes you just need to sell fast. Let's say you have a skin from a collection which was inactive for a long time, making the prices of the skins go very high, and then suddenly the collection became active again for whatever reason. Or Gaben officially tells us that he is going to do something crazy with the market which will inevitably crash everything. In that case yes, sell fast (just an example)

Useful sites and tools

Use all external sites, tools and addons at your own risk, some are risky to use, some old and not updated
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• https://db.csgofloat.com/ item database with over 100 million skins
• http://www.steamanalyst.com/ - Moving averages
• http://csgostash.com/ - All items categorized and visualized
• http://steam.tools/itemvalue/ - Value of inventories
• http://csgo.exchange/ - Value of inventories, item prices and quantities, database. trade up calculator
• http://steamcharts.com/app/730 - CSGO Player Base Stats
• http://www.hltv.org/ - CSGO news
• http://blog.counter-strike.net/ - Official CSGO blog
• https://www.csgostickersearch.com/ - search market for skins with stickers
• Software: Steam Market Watchlist - Track investments
• Automatic Account Creation - old post, use software at own risk
• Steam Desktop Authenticator - for mass confirming (very risky, defeats the purpose of mobile auth)
• WinAuth - for mass confirming (very risky, defeats the puporse of mobile auth)

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Chrome addons:

• Steam Inventory Helper - mass listing, WARNING READ THIS before deciding to use or not
• Steam Wizard - mass listing (some other functions don't work anymore or are outdated)
• CSGOFloat Market Checker - float value, paint seed, and screenshots of CS:GO items
• Better Buy Orders - see all the buy orders of an item in the Steam Community Market
• Steam Enhancer

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Useful Youtube Channels

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• TDM HeyZeus - CSGO Market and Trade-up Contracts
• eSports Talk - CSGO News
• 3kliksphilip - CSGO Updates, Skins, etc.
• TheWarOwl - CSGO Updates, Maps, etc.

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Credits
Helicobacter: FAQ 2.0 (huge shoutout, copied a lot of stuff from this FAQ, sometimes word by word)
Steamfrag: Very useful graphs and market data
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Disclaimer: The information offered here is not financial advice. We, the mod team, are just a bunch of gamers and hobby investors. Do your own due dilligence before investing any real money in to a game and do it at your own risk! Use all external links, sites, tools, addons, etc. at your own risk! Any information in this thread may be outdated at any given time. You should be mentally prepared to lose everything invested in virtual items. Valve could change the rules affecting the market anytime. Third party cashout and trading sites and their BOTS could be banned anytime. External events such as successful lawsuits against Valve, new state laws, new country laws, etc. could also affect the market anytime by forcing Valve to take measures (for instance case opening is now restricted in Belgium and Netherlands, OPSkins got banned, Gambling sites were banned, etc.). Also note that all of your items legally belong to Valve, even if you paid for them.
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Suggestions and potential corrections to this guide are always welcomed and will be added if necessary and approved by the mod team. I will try to keep this guide updated.
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Last updated: Nov. 2019