💧 What the Score Measures
The liquidity score is a 0-100 rating of how quickly you could sell an item without cutting the price. It is not a rating of how good a skin is, how rare it is, or how much it is worth. It answers one question: if you listed this today at the going rate, would it be gone?
That question matters more than most people expect, because liquidity is a property of order flow, not of price. A knife worth $3,000 can change hands several times a day while a $4 skin sits for three weeks with no standing buy order behind it. Price tells you what an item is worth. Liquidity tells you whether you can get it.
You will see the score in three places: the ring on the liquidity card of every item page, the chip on browse and wishlist rows, and the full ranking on the CS2 liquidity board, where every rated item in the catalogue is sorted by trade flow.
Trade flow sets the tier, the tier owns a 25-point band of the 0-100 scale, and the evidence only decides where inside that band the item lands. A wide spread or a long listing queue costs a whole band. Nothing ever promotes an item above what its best measurement supports.
🏷️ The Five Tiers & Their Bands
Every rated item sits in one of five tiers, and each tier owns a fixed, non-overlapping slice of the 0-100 scale. The badge and the number can never disagree, because the number is derived from the badge rather than computed alongside it.
| Tier | Score | What it means for a seller | How to trade it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Very liquid | 90 – 100 | Sells within hours at market price | Treat it as cash. You can exit at the going rate whenever you want to. |
| Liquid | 75 – 89 | Usually sells within a day | A normal position. List at market and expect it gone inside a day or so. |
| Moderately liquid | 50 – 74 | Typically a few days to sell | Plan the exit before you buy. Fine to hold, slow to leave in a hurry. |
| Thin market | 25 – 49 | Can take a week or more to sell | Sizing matters. One copy is patience; five copies is a problem. |
| Illiquid | 0 – 24 | Rarely trades — expect to discount to exit | Assume the exit costs a discount, and price the discount in on the way in. |
The bands are deliberately uneven. Moderately liquid spans 25 points because most of the catalogue lives there, and a wide band keeps a busy item distinguishable from a barely-moving one. Very liquidgets the top 11 points because past a certain volume the only useful statement left is "this sells instantly".
The thresholds behind each tier
Two measurements can place an item, and they are not interchangeable — one is a rate, the other is a rank. Both are shown here so you can see exactly where a boundary sits:
| Tier | Measured trade flow | BUFF liquidity percentile |
|---|---|---|
| Very liquid | 380+ per day | 99.1 – 100 |
| Liquid | 40 – 380 per day | 91.1 – 99.1 |
| Moderately liquid | 8 – 40 per day | 77.6 – 91.1 |
| Thin market | 1 – 8 per day | 54.7 – 77.6 |
| Illiquid | under 1 per day | under 54.7 |
The percentile boundaries sit at the same quantiles as the trade-rate boundaries — the top tier near the 99th percentile of the catalogue, the next near the 90th — so an item does not become easier or harder to rate depending on which source happened to see it.
📊 The Three Signals
Three things decide how liquid an item is, and a rating built on any one of them alone fails in a predictable direction:
| Signal | What it is | Why it fails on its own |
|---|---|---|
| Flow | Units actually traded per day | Overstates. An item can trade 20 a day and still leave your listing buried behind 600 others. |
| Queue | Listings on the sell side ÷ that venue's daily flow | Says nothing about demand. An empty queue on an item nobody buys is not liquidity. |
| Spread | Gap between the best buy order and the best listing | This is what selling now rather than eventually costs you. Wide spread means the flow is happening at prices you would not accept. |
The queue figure is measured against the trades at its own venue, not against pooled flow across every market. A queue only clears through the order book it sits in — the listings ahead of yours on one marketplace are untouched by sales happening on another. Dividing one venue's listings by everyone's trades would understate the wait, which is exactly the optimistic direction a selling signal must not fail in.
🔎 Where the Numbers Come From
Two independent measurements feed the rating, and each is blind where the other sees.
1. Measured trade flow
Units traded over a trailing 30-day window, combining Steam Market sales with the turnover we observe on the marketplaces we track. Days with no observation count as zero trades, not as missing data — thin sampling therefore drags an estimate down rather than inflating it.
2. BUFF's published liquidity percentile
BUFF163 is the largest CS2 marketplace by volume and publishes a 0-100 liquidity rank per item, built from fills it actually processed. That is strictly more than anyone can infer from listing snapshots, and it covers the part of the market Steam cannot see at all.
The Steam Community Market will not list anything above $1,800. Every knife, every pair of gloves and most high-tier covert skins therefore generate zero Steam sales data — not low data, none. Below the cap both sources usually speak. Above it, only BUFF does.
This is why the two numbers on a knife's card can look like they are arguing: a Karambit BUFF ranks in the high 99s may show a fraction of a trade per day beside it. The percentile is the measurement; the trades-per-day figure is only what we could see elsewhere, and a book that relists as fast as it sells barely moves in a snapshot.
Where both sources have an opinion, the more liquid of the two wins. They measure different order books, and both are real: an item that trades hard on Steam is liquid whatever BUFF's percentile says about BUFF, and the reverse holds too.
🧮 How a Score Is Built
Four steps, in this order:
1. Place the item. Take the better of the flow tier and the BUFF tier.
2. Apply demotions. Spread and queue checks can each cost a full tier. Nothing promotes.
3. Find the position. How far into its band the winning measurement reached, 0 to 1.
4. Map to the band. Place that position inside whatever band the item ended up in.
Step 3 is log-scaled on trade flow and linear on BUFF's percentile. Flow is a rate that spans orders of magnitude — the step from 1 to 8 trades a day is the same kind of change as 40 to 380 — so a linear read would pin nearly every item to the floor of its band. A percentile is already a rank, so re-shaping it would double-count the distribution.
Step 4 is why relative position survives a demotion. An item sitting at the top of Liquid that loses a tier to a 60% spread lands at the top of Moderately liquid — still the strongest thing in its class, just no longer in the class it measured into.
⬇️ What Pulls a Rating Down
Four rules can move an item down, and none can move one up. Every demotion that fired is listed on the item's liquidity card, so you always see why a rating is where it is.
| Rule | Trigger | Cost | Reasoning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wide spread | Bid/ask gap of 40% or more | One full tier | The trades are real but they are clearing at a price well under the ask. Selling now costs you the gap. |
| Deep queue | 14+ days of listings ahead of you | One full tier | The flow is genuine, it is just not going to reach your listing any time soon. |
| No standing buy orders | Zero bids on the book | Capped at Moderately liquid | You can sell, but only by waiting for a buyer to appear. Nothing is standing there ready to take it. |
| Inferred flow | Trades implied by listings vanishing, with no BUFF rank | Capped at Liquid, and below high confidence | A listing that disappears may have sold — or been delisted or repriced. That is evidence of movement, not proof of demand. |
A 40% spread threshold sounds high if you are used to equities. It is not, for this market: bids on CS2 venues sit far below asks as a rule, and the median tracked item runs around a 20% spread. A threshold that fired on the typical item would flag most of the catalogue and discriminate nothing. The raw spread is reported on the card regardless, so an item with a 25% gap still shows it — it just does not lose a tier for being ordinary.
🎯 Confidence vs Score
Alongside the score sits a confidence chip. It answers a different question — not how liquid, but how much evidence is behind that:
| Confidence | What produced it |
|---|---|
| High | Two or more independent venues, 20+ active days in the window, data no more than 2 days old — or two sources landing on the same tier. |
| Medium | At least 10 active days and data within 3 days, but short of the bar above. |
| Low | Thin or ageing coverage. The rating is the best read available, not a firm one. |
One extra check runs here: if the median day in the window is far below the mean, the series is being carried by one or two outlier days, and confidence drops. A single busy afternoon inside a quiet month is not a liquid market.
Confidence deliberately does not move the score. Averaging "how well it trades" and "how sure we are" into one number would hide both, so they stay separate signals you read together.
🚫 When We Refuse to Rate
Some items show "not enough data" rather than a low score. Three cases produce that:
- No data — nothing observed for the item at all.
- Thin coverage — fewer than 10 of the 30 days carried an observation. Below that floor, the average says more about our sampling than about the market.
- Stale — the newest observation is more than 7 days old.
An item we stopped seeing is not an item nobody wants. Rating it 0 would be a confident claim built on an absence of evidence, so no rating is shown at all. If a skin you own is missing from the board, the honest reading is "we cannot tell yet" — go and look at the live listing depth and buy orders yourself.
🛠️ How to Use It
When you are buying
- Check the score before the price, not after. A 15% discount on an item scoring in the 20s is not a discount — it is the market telling you what the exit costs.
- Match liquidity to your holding period. Flipping this week needs a 75+. Holding for a year, a 50 is fine.
- Read the demotion list. "No standing buy orders" on an item you planned to flip is a red flag the headline number alone would not have shown you.
When you are selling
- Use the queue figure to set expectations. If there are 30 days of listings ahead of you, listing at the going rate means waiting, not selling.
- Use the spread to price the hurry. A wide spread is the cost of instant sale — that is the discount an instant-sell buyout is charging you.
- Split large positions. Five copies of a Thin market item is a different problem from one copy; the queue you are joining includes your own other listings.
When you are investing
- Liquidity is the risk you cannot see in a price chart. A price history looks equally smooth whether the item trades 500 times a day or twice a week.
- Percentage moves on thin volume are noise. One optimistic listing can move the average on an item that barely trades. Check the score before you act on a trending gainer.
- Size positions against the exit, not the entry. The number that matters is how many copies the market absorbs per day, not how cheap they look today.
💧 See every rated item ranked
The CS2 liquidity board ranks the whole tracked catalogue by real trade flow, updated every 15 minutes — filter by knives, gloves, rifles or cases, or sort by widest spread to find the items where exiting costs the most.
🧠 Five Common Misreadings
1. "Expensive means illiquid"
Not reliably. Popular knives and gloves in standard conditions trade constantly. What actually kills liquidity at the top end is not the price but the specificity — a rare pattern, a heavy sticker craft, an unusual float. See the most liquid CS2 skins for the breakdown.
2. "High trades per day means I can sell now"
Only if the queue is short. Flow measures the market, the queue measures your place in it. The rating already combines the two, which is why an item with impressive volume can still land in a lower band.
3. "The score dropped, so demand collapsed"
Check the demotion list first. A band-sized drop is more often a spread widening or a queue building than flow disappearing — and both of those can happen while the number of trades stays flat.
4. "Low confidence means low liquidity"
It means thin evidence. A recently released item can be genuinely liquid and still carry low confidence because the window has not filled up yet.
5. "Every condition of a skin has the same liquidity"
They do not, and the gap is often large. Field-Tested is usually the most traded condition of a popular skin simply because it is the most common; the same skin in Well-Worn can score two bands lower. Ratings are per condition for exactly this reason — float and wear change what you are actually selling.
❓ FAQ
Is the liquidity score the same as the price?
No, and the two are close to independent. Liquidity is a property of order flow, not of value. A $3,000 knife that changes hands every day is more liquid than a $4 skin nobody lists a buy order for. Price tells you what an item is worth; the liquidity score tells you whether you can actually get that number.
What does a score of 100 mean?
The top band is open-ended, so 100 is reserved for genuine extremes — items trading many multiples of the 380-per-day floor of the top tier. In practice a handful of cases and capsules reach it. Anything in the 90s already means "sells within hours at market price".
Why does a heavily traded skin sometimes score lower than I expect?
Because trade count alone flatters an item. Two checks can pull a rating down a full band: a bid/ask spread of 40% or more, which means the trades are happening at a price you probably would not accept, and a listing queue of 14 days or more, which means the flow is real but it is clearing other people's listings before yours. Nothing pushes a rating up — an item is never rated more liquid than its best measurement says.
Why does a knife show a high score but a fraction of a trade per day?
Because the two numbers come from different books. The Steam Market will not list anything above $1,800, so our Steam sales feed is silent on almost every knife and glove. Above that cap the rating comes from BUFF's published liquidity percentile, which is built from fills BUFF actually processed. The trades-per-day figure beside it only ever describes what we could measure elsewhere, and on a book that relists as fast as it sells that figure reads near zero.
What does the confidence chip mean, and why does it not change the score?
Confidence describes how much evidence sits behind the rating — how many days of the 30-day window carried observations, how many independent venues contributed, how recent the newest one is. How well an item trades and how sure we are of it are two different claims, and averaging them into a single number would hide both. So the score answers "how liquid", the chip answers "how sure", and you read them together.
Why do some items say "not enough data" instead of showing a low score?
Because an item we cannot measure is not the same as an item nobody wants. If fewer than 10 days inside the 30-day window carried an observation, or the newest observation is more than 7 days old, the rating is withheld. A badge people make selling decisions on should fail toward "we do not know", never toward "yes, it will sell".
How often does the score update?
The underlying view refreshes every 15 minutes, and the ratings move with it. The window itself is trailing, so a rating reflects the last 30 days of trading rather than the last hour — a single busy afternoon will not lift an item a band, and a single quiet one will not drop it.
Does a high score guarantee a fast sale?
No. It says the market has been absorbing that volume recently at the prices shown. Demand shifts, and your own asking price still decides whether you are at the front of the queue or the back. Treat it as a read on the market, not a promise about your sale.