abyss crystal world of warcraft

The Secret Philosophies Of The Serious WoW Investor

Our entire gold-making system is predicated on the concept of investing.  I suppose you could say it’s somewhat related to retail.  But even though there are concepts of inventory management and price points and all of those retailing concepts, without a true vehicle for marketing (outside of trade chat) it feels more like investing to me.

Now, there are a number of you that work the AH like a day trader.  Buying things on the margin to make a quick turn by the end of a day or two.  But that’s not really the way you should approach things either.  Making leveraged plays will often get your fanny in a crack if you don’t guess right.

And that’s really the point, you need a system that eliminates the need to guess by never, ever making a bad play.  Be smart in your speculation, and even your speculative purchases are, in effect, a covered call.  Yes, you are going to lose sometimes.  But what you can do is limit your losses to the barest minimum.

Yes, it logically follows that if you play it safer you might also reduce your profit potential.  That’s just fine, I can live with that IF I do one more thing.  It’s this one thing that makes all the difference in the world when it comes to spending less and less time making more and more gold at the auction house.

Before we get to the secret to maximizing income, let’s talk a bit about limiting risk in every situation.  The way you do this is something we might should have covered in a little more detail sooner, but sometimes you can’t learn unless you get smacked pretty hard.  I certainly hope no one is losing their shirt on the S6 play, but here is why I am assured a tidy profit.

As we bought up those Abyss Crystals and other mats to drain the market we did so with an understanding of supply and demand economics.  So even though we were sucking stacks and stacks of them off the AH, we never spent more than the current market value for any of them.  In other words the going rate for Abyss Crystals was 125 gold, and even though we bought more than 250 of them, we never spent more than 125g for a single one.

But since we were sucking up more than 75% of the market, the price rose naturally for three weeks.  By the time we stopped buying people out, the natural price was already closer to 180g.  We created scarcity, and even on a rabid undercutting server the price rose dramatically.

Now, when the patch hit we went right to the AH and posted the crystals we bought for 125 and down for 250 bid, 300 buyout.  And we haven’t sold a single one yet.  Worried yet?  I’m not worried a stitch, and that’s because I know how the market is going to move in the next 3 weeks.  I also am guaranteed at least a 25% profit in the process.

Right now no one is buying because they just blew 1000g on dual specs.  They are busy running Ulduar and getting waxed by Emalon in VoA.  They are just busy.  Already people are starting to panic at the AH.  A good number of other folks apparently stockpiled Abyss Crystals right along with us.  But they still make up a fairly small portion of the market.  Our guild owns maybe 500 crystals, everyone who is now cutting prices to sell NOW have maybe 20.  Makes me laugh.

I still won’t buy them out yet.  Let them blow away their profits, I’m standing pat.  Because what will happen is that once people get over blowing 1k gold and get into running the new dailies and start collecting some of that T8 gear, the demand for enchants will be higher than ever before.  Even without S6, I was going to make a killing.

So I might not sell a thing before next Wednesday.  And I’ll still be grinning.  One of two things is going to happen.  One, I will sell a ton of stuff next weekend because I know the itch will become a burn before long.  People want enchants now, but won’t pay my price – yet.  But buyers are only slightly more patient than sellers.  The need to have will bury the want to wait.

The second thing that can happen is that nothing ever comes of the patch at all.  No big push is no big deal either.  Prices will fall slightly below past values in the next two weeks as all the ah scabs cut their losses or blow out stuff they farmed.  I’ll just hold every mat I’ve got until the rush is over and then trickle it back on at 120% of past prices.  I’ll sell a few here and a few there, and in a few weeks I still will have made more than 15,000 gold profit.

But I couldn’t be confident about that if I had overspent on the crystals.  This is not about a quick turn.  I don’t care if I make 25% today or 25% in two months.  Profit is profit since I don’t have interest to pay.  I’m not in the real world where inflation is eating at me, it’s just flat rate stuff with almost zero variables except what the market is like right now.  So I wait out markets until the now is good.

So by never paying more than the current price we covered ourselves from taking a loss.  I can drop my inflated price almost in half and still make a profit – no listing fees on enchanting mats right?  This is how I almost never lose a dime playing the AH, and I can do it all day every day and I don’t have to wait for a huge patch or an arena season to do it.

So the real key, the secret to applying this type of investing mindset which tells me to buy something when the price is right and hold it until the price is better, is volume.  Volume rules my WoW mindset.  Since my numbers are never wrong, I want as many things as I can possibly get my hands on because I make my money safe and steady with zero guesswork or gambling involved.

I deal in hundreds, sometimes thousands of auctions, and I don’t micro-manage a single one.  People ask me all the time “what do you think about buying item [XYZ]” I just shrug.  I don’t care what it is.  If I can buy it below market price and resell it at or above market price in four turns or less, I’ll sell it.  If I can’t it goes on the ignore list – probably forever.

The whole thing gets so automatic that you can just spam click and not even look at what you are doing.  It actually hurt my face a little bit to buy out specific things and hold all my DE mats from Northrend items for a month.  It actually made me work at it, a little bit.  The rest of the time it’s just 3k profit a week with my eyes closed.

Now, even though I’ve given you the secret, there is a formula for all of this that is much more complicated to explain.  We couldn’t even do it effectively in this format.  It would cause more confusion than mastery and Domination.  But we did want to tell you how to think about any AH investing you do now and in the future.

You cover yourself by buying smart, you cover yourself by buying and selling in huge volumes, and you cover yourself by never panicking and giving away your profits.  We teach people the entire process we use for every single aspect of this in the Auction House Mastery Guide, of course, but we thought we would settle all of you down before any little bit of panic set in.

No one ever made a fortune in a day – and no, the lottery doesn’t count.  There isn’t a lottery in WoW anyway, so there’s no prospect of instant riches.  And any really good financial adviser will tell you that investing well means buying things you trust and holding them.  Not this day trading quick buck junk.

So hang in there with those S6 enchanting mats.  I can almost guarantee you that next week the floodgates will begn to break and people will start to spend gold on that stuff.  We invested more than 30,000 gold in the month before the patch.  I fully expect a return of at least 10,000-25,000 within the next 12 days.  But I can live with 7k in the next three weeks, and that much is more than guaranteed because we invested smart, did a LOT of it, and we know our AH system always Dominates.