Question 1

What is Skin Trackers?

Accepted Answer

Skin Trackers is an open-methodology market index for the CS2 (Counter-Strike 2) skin economy. Five proprietary indices — STI 30, STI 100, STI 500, STI 1000, and STI Cases — follow S&P Dow Jones methodology with market-cap weighting, monthly or quarterly rebalance, and divisor adjustment for series continuity. Six years of backtested data from public Steam Community Market sources. The site is editorial publication: no marketplace, no affiliate revenue, no signup required, and the full methodology is published at /en/methodology.

Question 2

How is the STI 500 calculated?

Accepted Answer

STI 500 takes the top 500 CS2 skins by market cap (price multiplied by active Steam Market listings) after eligibility filters: minimum $5 price floor, at least 50 active listings, at least 12 months of price history, and a maximum $1,800 price cap aligned with the Steam Market ceiling. The index is rebalanced monthly. Each rebalance applies a divisor adjustment so the chart line stays continuous when constituents change — the same mechanism the S&P 500 has used since 1957.

Question 3

Where does the data come from?

Accepted Answer

All price data is scraped from public Steam Community Market historical price endpoints. Player count data comes from SteamCharts (free public source). Currency conversion uses Brazilian Central Bank (BCB) FX rates and AwesomeAPI. The methodology page lists every input source explicitly. There is no paid API, no insider feed, and no proprietary marketplace data — the indices can be independently reproduced from the same public data using the documented formulas.

Question 4

Is Skin Trackers free? Do I need to sign up?

Accepted Answer

Yes, completely free. No signup, no paywall, no ads, no affiliate links to marketplaces. The monthly newsletter is optional (one email per month, no spam). The site is a solo editorial project with no monetization — methodology is open so anyone can audit calculations, and the indices serve as analytical references for curious investors, traders looking for benchmarks, and researchers studying alternative asset microstructure.

Question 5

Why build an index for CS2 skins?

Accepted Answer

The CS2 skin market trades roughly $1B+ per year across more than 30,000 tradable items, but until now no professional index methodology had been applied to it. A real index — with fixed inclusion rules and periodic rebalance — answers questions a price tracker cannot: is the broad skin market up or down this year, how do cases perform vs the broad market, what is the correlation with active player count. STI fills that gap using the same S&P-style methodology used for equity indices.

Quantitative indices for the CS2 skin market

Built for quants — not for hype

Auditable methodology

6-year backtest

Multi-source coverage

Cross-asset benchmark

Largest price changes

Gainers

Losers

Transparent methodology, in 3 steps

Picking the skins

How items are weighted

Rebalance

Top reads from the editorial

The 9 icons: why a curated CS2 skin basket returned 7x the broad index

Pattern scarcity: why two AK-47 Case Hardeneds at the same float can be priced 100x apart

Why CS2 skins underperformed equities (and when they shouldn't)

Want to filter and discover skins?