The first time I got into Steam trading was with the Christmas sales 2 or 3 years ago. I read about the paperclip, and about a guy who traded up a stapler to a Ferrari using ebay. Anyway, I tried the same thing and started with nothing, won a copy of Half Life 2 from completing the free christmas achievements, used it on another account to get the achievements again (this is against the Steam ToS, don't try it) and got 2 other games, Frozen Synapse and PAM if I remember right. I traded these up for 3 games, and those for 4, etc. By January I had gained nearly 30 games from my wishlist, all for free by trading the two games up.
Anyway, good luck.
I've started trading with 50$,now I have items/games/cash for over 3000$ ...yeah it is possible but it eats too much time and nerves
Have you ever heard of Kyle MacDonald? He is a genius that traded one red paperclip for a house! After reading about that, I got to thinking that it was pretty neat, but I think that I can do better. I am going to try to trade one copy of Dota 2 (current value, around .2 paperclips), for Dishonored!
Ok, now that you are hopefully done laughing, let me explain. I don't actually believe that someone will trade Dota for Dishonored directly, but I never intended to. Instead, I just want to trade Dota for something just a bit better than it, then I'll trade that for something slightly better, and keep trading up until I reach my goal.
I hope that I have gotten at least a few of you interested in this, and I'll keep updating this thread with any changes in the situation. Wish me luck!