Tens is nothing these days tbh. It comes down to the fact that you need money if you want to make money. If you just stare at whatever you have, it'll obviously won't go up as much as you might want. I believe things use to be much more easier before server travel was a thing. Before that, you could have a monopoly on specific items and make other sellers cry when they thought they could get a piece of the pie.
- Travel between Data Centers and buy/sell at 4-10x. Don't bother doing this on the same DC. You can bring a billion or two over to Mana/Gaia/Elemental and turn it into five or six billion within a week.
- Purchase all the cheap items that retainers tend to bring back and stash them away for a year+. Eventually, those items are moved out of the list of items retainers bring back...
Spiritbonding in Urth's Fount.
- Trading houses.
- Submarines.
- Finding very niche markets that are overlooked by most. Basically, no need to keep up with the brand new items unless you want to compete with 20 other people camping the summoning bell.
- Sell primed grade 3 wheels of confrontation when an expansion comes around.
- Offer to power level Free Companies.
Desynthesis
- Befriend known social players on your server/DC and be the person they refer to when they say they know a guy who knows a guy. These people or their friends always have some sort of odd request and with enough time, they'll go directly to you to help them out with whatever they want. That also allows you front row tickets for whatever drama that might entail.
You don't have to put a ton of effort into it. Just have to be smarter than the next guy (not very difficult).