If you want to get ahead of the curve when trading stocks and shares, some of the best advice out there is to simply keep an eye out for what rich US senators are doing, but for Counter-Strike 2 players, the equivalent unfortunately isn't so s1mple.
In the wake of Valve's most controversial update, which tore down CS2 inventories worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, some fresh accounts have risen to the top of the wealth list, and they're almost entirely full of some of the cheapest reds around—or at least they used to be cheap.
Before I reveal the big winners of this update, here's a little rundown of what happened for anyone wondering what the hell is actually going on. In short, knives are the white whale of CS2 collectors.
They were hard to come by: It used to be that you could only get them by opening a crate, and even then, you'd have a tiny chance of actually getting one. So for those who just really, really wanted a knife, the cheapest way to get one would be to trade.
Regardless of how it happened, a ton of players and streamers treated skins as an investment opportunity, like Ohnepixel, who built up impressive inventories that were worth up to $500,000, but are now suddenly worth much less. The last CS2 update gave players a new way to get StatTrak knives, regular knives, and regular gloves: you trade up five red Covert items. Many reds were dirt cheap and relatively easy to get a hold of, so the most revered skins were always knives, a sentiment that has recently flipped.
A few accounts managed to get ahead of the curve by buying up swathes of these reds back before the patch, when they were cheap, and have now seen the value of their inventories soar as players scramble to buy and trade them up for some of the best knives in CS2.
One such case right now involves players chasing the Butterfly Knife Emerald, one of the most valuable knives in CS2, by trading up the MP9 Starlight Protector, which used to be the cheapest red in the Dreams and Nightmares collection.
The day of the update, this MP9 was worth just £2.02, but it has since risen to around £50, which doesn't sound like much, but it stacks. Streamer dima_wallhacks pointed out a fresh account with a full inventory of these MP9s that were purchased pre-patch, meaning that they are all tradeable, which is "worth around $90,000 now". It's all just a bit fucky if I'm being honest. But the dream is real, former CS: GO pro player friberg actually managed to snag a BFK Emerald after trading in some reds.
this might be the single biggest update to the market, ever pic.twitter.com/IDZRCNNpjeOctober 23, 2025
The BFK Emerald may still be one of the most coveted knives around, but even its value took a pretty big hit, losing more than half of its initial $20,000 worth, although it's climbed back up to around $11,000 now. The market will stabilise in due time, but before it does, things'll be a little weird.
"YOOO just traded up to this $20,000 BFK EMERALD," steamer Furiousss jokes. "I shall use this $2,000 BFK to good use, might also just put all of the $200 into my son's college savings. How else can you invest $20? Either way, thanks for the $2." Yeah, it do be like that right now.
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