A New Trader's Guide

GG.Deals is your friend. It's super quick and convenient to check the current values of games, which will help you to keep from getting scammed from unscrupulous traders offering unbalanced trades to newer and/or low rep members. Lowest current pricing is what you're looking for when evaluating trade values. You'll want to stay at or just a little below that.

There is the occasional instance where a game that's been bundled is selling for at or close to retail price exclusively. Use your discretion in determining value under those circumstances. Personally, I use the 50% rule there. Meaning, I evaluate their value as half retail.

Most established traders don't really care about 'going first' any longer, but from an etiquette standpoint, if you have significantly lower rep, you should go first in a trade. When in doubt, whoever is making the offer goes first. Additionally, never accept waiting until a potential trade partner sells the game or what have you, for them to complete a trade. The terms of a trade need to be completed at the time of the trade. Waiting for the trade is fine, but terms must conclude once both parties come together for said trade.

Never trade Humble gift links. All that does is place your Humble account in jeopardy of being locked by Humble for violating ToS. Always reveal keys when ready to trade instead.

You don't work for other traders. If a trader wants you to put in extra work, like filling out their spreadsheets or what have you, politely decline. They are more than capable of handling their own bookkeeping. If they want to offer something extra for your work however, then maybe go for it. :)

Most important: ALWAYS. ALWAYS. ALWAYS click on their Steam profile link here on ST before accepting a friend invite for trading, to verify that it is in fact the person you agreed to trade with. There are a lot of impostors out there hoping to take advantage of people's naivety.

This is more of a personal observation, but when people blindly add you to "discuss a trade", it's generally going to be them trying to convince you to do something you don't want to do trading wise, and these interactions usually end poorly or are at the very least a hassle. There's always a reason they want to discuss a trade in private and that reason is very rarely beneficial for you. Handling trade business in a public setting (i.e. a trade thread) is always preferable.

When dealing with resellers (traders who buy bulk keys) and other opportunists, they are typically only going to offer you between 25% to 50% of the game's actual trade value. Your acceptance of this may vary lol.

Let's talk about marketable item trades. When you see threads asking to trade gems for TF2 keys or similar, those are scams. Look at the Steam market values and do the math. There is literally no benefit to these trades for you. They functionally are asking you to give them a $5 bill in return for 4 $1 bills, to use an analogy. Not a sensible trade.

One last note: a lot of traders are resellers and will hold on to the keys they trade for for potentially months and years. By revealing a key when a trade has been agreed upon, you are able to guarantee its authenticity at the time of your trade. If your trade partner holds on to a key instead of redeeming it, and later something happens like a developer or publisher revoking keys, that is not your responsibility. The key was good when you traded it. It's on your trade partner if they hold onto it afterwards.