Use less. I need a volley partner just started yesterday, have 80m going to volley u keep, goal is to make 500m from volley and upgrade. then make money from volley and battles, will help you once i have a few bill and buy all you have bought back.
The other thing I like to do is sweep ranges and corner one market. For instance, a number of people will search in the 500m range. To get your ally just underneath 500m, you divide 500 by 1.05 because the original hire value increases by 5%. 500/1.05 is equal to about 476.19, but for ease I'll just look for allies to hire starting at 476m. This method is also used in trading stock- creating bands to buy/sell at. Sometimes ANYONE that buys a decent ally from the 500m range will be buying it from ME! The equation to find out what value you need to hire an ally at to get the value you want is: (value you want your ally to be)/1.05 This will let you figure out allies to hire that other people will buy. A number of people already do this, so you can even kick it back a step and do 476/1.05. Keep in mind that the game does round, so you should double check your calculations with what the game actually does. The previous strategy is only for trading allies that sell quickly, but another thing I like to do is pick medium size active allies. This is REALLY easy to do because of pwars. I like to do this at odd ranges- aka ranges that don't show up in sweeps or hav0c's strat, because it'll let you find some good allies a few others may have overlooked. All you do is find someone with decent stats and then check the current pwar he or she is in. Make sure he's doing well, and then check his stats and hire cost to others in his clan. Find the best/most active peeps you can! If he doesn't show up in pwar history, I usually forget about him and find someone else. Keep in mind that if someone resets, all of their allies are "dropped", so you should be able to get some good deals that way too. If you find a dropped ally, search in that range for other dropped allies that might be extremely underpriced. Now if a player doesn't have an owner, his price will go down after (I believe it's 3 days). Check back in the bands of the decreased price in a couple of days to see if you can get some more good deals. Anyways, I use these strats, hav0c's, and a couple of others. That means I am ALWAYS making money by selling allies. I'd encourage people to employ multiple different trading strategies if possible. Some people may already be maxed on ally slots so they won't be able to hit the low ranges, but if that's true they probably don't need to be reading this anyways .
For a while I didn't want to share my trading strategies, but I realized that the more people that are trading the better because it'll create more liquidity. I don't know if you want to do this, but I'd encourage you (hav0c) to include at the start that you need to trade allies or you're a noob, and a number of the LB peeps have over 3T gold, and you can't really get 3T in gold from attacks only. I'd like to encourage more people to trade instead of just getting MP and hitting an OSF!