How to become a Bellionaire in the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Stalk Market

There’s no better way to get back at Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ capitalist overlord, Tom Nook, than to become a bonafide Bell-ionaire yourself. The best way to do that without spending the rest of your days on your island fishing or farming tarantulas is by playing the Stalk Market by exchanging turnips with Daisy Mae, and potentially other players.

Every Sunday from 5 a.m. to 12 p.m., a drippy-nose orange boar named Daisy Mae will visit your island to sell her turnips. You can buy her root veggies and sell them to Timmy and Tommy Nook at a profit, but swindling the Nooklings to earn a fat stack of Bells isn’t as simple as it might sound.

Turnip prices are constantly in flux. Daisy Mae sells them at different rates each week, and those rates are different on every island. The Nooklings will also change their buying price twice a day from Monday through Saturday, and this at the beginning of a new-in game day and again at noon. To top all of this off, your turnips will spoil at the start of the following Sunday, rendering them unsellable and you potentially broke.

Just like making it big on Wall Street, dabbling in the Stalk Market requires dedication and careful timing to decide when it’s the best time to unload turnips for optimal profits. Luckily, the dedicated turnip traders of the internet have developed a handful of tools to estimate a pattern in turnip prices so you can calculate exactly when to sell your Bells for maximum racks.

Game the Stalk Market by predicting price patterns

There are four known price “patterns” that have been noted by Stalk Market expert Maddox Knight on Twitter: Random, Decreasing, Small Spike, and Large Spike (or Camel Hump).

Trying to decipher where the Stalk Market is going every week can be a daunting task, but Redditor u/mikebryanuk posted a tool on the turnip trading subreddit on Wednesday that automates the process for you. All you have to do is check in with Tim and Tommy twice a day to verify their buying price, and the web tool will predict how much they’ll be paying in the future. The best thing you can do is use a resource like this to graph the price fluctuations that let you track the trends. You can also pool your resources together with friends to see who has the best price pattern on any given week.

Keep in mind that these are estimates based on a theoretical understanding of Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s Stalk Market, so the tool can and will be wrong on occasion. The more data points you give it, however, the better chance it has of predicting that week’s turnip price pattern. If you're looking to expand outside of your network and grow potential earnings tenfold, consider outsourcing the problem by using digital resources.

Find a high stakes seller on the Turnip Exchange

The best resource for maximizing your profits in the Stalk Market is called Turnip Exchange. The official Turnip Exchange website is perhaps the best place to go, but there's also an overlapping dedicated r/acturnips subreddit.

Using the Dodo Code system inherent to Animal Crossing: New Horizons that allows anyone to visit a stranger's island so long as they have their Dodo Code, both systems allow dozens of players to invade a strange island in a somewhat orderly fashion. Everyone walks away with tons of Bells.

Anyone can host their island's current sell price in either place. Plenty of players on the subreddit will request that people submit their favorite food or Villager from the game, and others will request a specific minimum tip (Capitalism!).

In a more straightforward fashion, the turnip.exchange website will establish waiting queues for anyone who wants to sell their turnips at a high price, and once you're up, it will automatically distribute the Dodo Code needed. Most redditors on the subreddit will use the website's queue's anyway, but if you do use the subreddit, be sure to filter by New to get the most up-to-date listings.

Demand increases dramatically for islands where the sell prices reach 600 or beyond, which obviously leads to incredibly long waits. But plenty of players are willing to wait hours if it means turning a 100,000 Bell investment into a cool 1,000,000.

So throw on a power suit, start crunching numbers, and get in line. The Stalk Market is waiting for you.