Speculation Roulette

World of warcraft has an incredibly realistic economy where supply and demand truly shape the value of items, and there is an inate sense of how much gold per hour a character should make. This stable economy fluctuates rarely but when it does huge amounts of gold can be made. There are times however, when players go overboard with speculating.

Speculation has it's moments, I have made gold fastest on patch days when new elements are added to the game and everyone wants them right away. Inscription netted me 20k gold right off the bat on the first weekend after it was introduced. It was amazing openning my mail box and life was good. However, things don't always turn out so well for the speculator. In fact, most of the time you are going to fail at speculating. Remember the 80/20 rule? It applies here as well.

Speculation is dangerous and it frightens me to see players spending 90% of their gold on stockpiling items for a patch. You should never throw all your money at any one item, especially an item whos price is yet to be determined. Speculation is gambling, and you should go about it as such. Whatever you bet you should be prepared to lose and not have to get into the soup line anytime soon after. Also, if you plan on selling ALL your items on patch day then you have to consider two factors: What will the demand be (ie how many will I actually sell) and How much competition will there be?

The goal of this blog is to provide you with the tools to create STEADY, DEPENDABLE, ROCK-SOLID, and OTHER SYNONYMS FOR GOOD cash flow which will make you filthy rich in the long run. It's ok to invest in the latest goods, but you should also keep up your auction house, farming, and other wow gold practices to maintain a reliable source of income.

In particular I'd like to address the dream shard issue. Some players are very worried that they wasted their money and I'd like to comfort them with some important information which they may not be aware of.

For starters, guild banks were full of these shards and you have to expect a large amount to come from their stockpiles. Enchanters who bought all of their new enchants were easily gathering the shards as well. If the price dropped because of a flooding of shards, these two groups were the culprits. Understand that although the banks and enchanters have many many shards to sell, they will sell them all eventually and the price will increase. On some servers this process literally took an hour or two before the price of dream shards shot up to 30-40g a piece. However, many servers are still in the process of guild banks/enchanters selling their shards and depending on demand it may take a while for these to be used up.

8 comments: on "Speculation Roulette"

  1. Yes... this has happened on my server. The first day I managed to sell a few for 30g then an hour later the market had been flooded with 10 pages down to 10g/shard and is still hovering around there.

  2. That same situation happened on my server (arthas). i just keep buying them up, all the ones under 14g. i've been using these cheap dream shards to buy new enchants now that i'im 450. I trust Marcko and think that they will eventually go back to that 25-30g mark.

  3. Same here :) I sold about a stack of them on patch day for a reasonable price (around 25-30+ gold each) and within a few hours the price sank to 15-20. I've not sold a single one since patch day, however I've not panicked once :p People ALWAYS need shards, and if you followed the guidelines you could sell them all for 12g each and still not come out a loser. Just hold onto them for a bit longer and your price will return to something nicer :)

    On a side note, my AH is still hovering around 10-12 gold each and there's around 150 auctions up constantly. People are too stupid and keep undercutting and flooding the market. As soon as they make a quick buck I'll swoop in and make a large buck :p

  4. Pretty much the same thing happened to my server. Before patch, Dream Shards were hovering around 7-10g a piece. I bought out pretty much all of 7-9g (about 20 stacks of them). After the patch came out, the AH was flooded with Dream Shards and some of them were selling for 4-6g. Right now it's back up to around 8-9g. I guess I'll wait few more weeks and see what happens.

  5. I had stockpiled about 3 stacks of dram shards for the patch. As soon as the servers came up I posted them and managed to bring in about a 400g profit, which is great. I probably could have gotten more but I was being conservative and posting them for only a bit more than I had bought them for. A few days later they were back down to their original price. I know there were probably a lot of people who got screwed by it, but luckily I wasn't one of them.

    When WOTLK came out I had stockpiled a ton of the BC mats expecting the price to go up since there would be less people disenchanting outlands gear. It wasn't until a couple of weeks ago that I was finally able to sell them for a decent amount. Sometimes it just takes a lot of patience and luck.

  6. Speculation didnt really go my way this patch:
    -Dream shards never took off (collected several hundred of them)
    - frozen orb only increased by 10g, collected loads of them too of AH.
    - titansteel stuff never got implemented, which we knew for a while, but still collected bout 40 of them..

    But, whatever i invested in buying out loads of the above I have made back selling tons of infinite dusts and cosmic essenses. Who would have thought these to that were "nerfed" in usage would rise as much as they have done on my server infinite 6g+ (50%increase postpatch), greater cosmic from 23-25g to 30-40g).
    So i have more gold and loads of the above stuff waiting for the right moment..

  7. The reason enchanting mats are going up in value is due to blizzard removing several easy methods for crafting/disenchanting high level greens.

    Currently the cheapest item you can craft/disenchant are the JC rings that cost two eternal earths. If you look at eternal earths on your server I'm sure you'll see that they are either in short supply or atleast going up in value.

  8. Thanks Markco for the input. Yes the main reason why i have so much infinite and cosmics are the cheap JC eternal stuff. Eternal Earth is surely increasing, prepatch between 4-6g, now kinda stuck on the 8-9g. Not to stress the Earth market i usually go for the one with one shadow and one earth.
    Shadow still down there round 5g mark.
    Thanks for great info..
    Theramoe (AD)

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