How CS Terminal works

For me, CS skins have been an interesting investment for years. I bought my first Phoenix cases back in 2014 and I still hold them today.

I kept wondering what had become of those cases, so I combed through all sorts of sites looking for answers. Even a simple question like “what return have my cases made per year?” or “is that a lot or a little compared to other cases?” I couldn’t answer. Incomplete data, timelines that often covered only weeks or months, broken charts. So I ended up doing it by hand in the Steam charts: reading values off the screen, copying them into a spreadsheet, working out the CAGR. For 20 cases side by side? A pain. Is there a trend? Are cases still as profitable as they used to be, or are the skins doing better? No idea.

That is where this site comes from. Everything that bugged me, I wanted to build in and do better.

The point of this site fits in one sentence: to build the most complete data series possible for every item in Counter Strike, then slice it, dice it and compare it against every other series, so you get a picture of how CS items have done from an investment perspective.

The focus is deliberately on the long run. This site is not interested in individual items, crafts, unusual patterns or unique skins. We care about the big picture. You will not find the best arbitrage play here, hot picks or invented scores. You will find data, prepared by fixed rules so it is genuinely comparable and easy to understand, so you can make up your own mind. On top of that sit the numbers an investor asks for: growth since entry, drawdowns, volatility, liquidity, and how an item stacks up against its case, its weapon class and the whole market.

One principle runs through all of it: we show you what happened, not what to buy.

If you want to know exactly how the prices are sourced, cleaned and turned into these numbers (the price cap, the marketplace switch, outliers), it is all laid out on the Methodology page. Take a look!

I hope you find the site I have built here just as useful and insightful as I do. Enjoy!