Risk vs Reward; Stockpiling.

Posted by The Lost Meeple at 8:00 AM

Have you forgotten about this nifty little "pet"? Well I'm here to remind you about him and the great gold making opportunities this nifty item brings along with him. My relationship with the Haunted Memento dates as far back as Wrath, roughly a year or two ago where everyone and their mother had one, now? Not so much. I snagged 5-6 of these at 3-500g per and just let them sit there because I knew that sooner or later the supply was going to slow down thus causing the price of this item to slowly rise ( also note the fact they're no longer obtainable ).


Nearly a year and a half later I value these puppies at 3-5k per. That's a 600% ROI on this item for holding onto it for nearly a year. My suggestion to you is to have this item on your TUJ snatch list ( which you should already ) and just snag it whenever it's cheap then proceed to flip it.


Another item that I've been holding onto for a bit is the infamous Orb of Deception. During Wrath and the cataclysm beta there were numerous reports that this orb would become unobtainable. I panicked and picked up four of these at 1500g per to simply keep & sell at a later date on my never played secondary bank alt. Now adays this item is worth nearly double and sometimes triple of what I paid for it. It's much harder to obtain than it was pre-shattering and pre-cataclysm.


The moral of this post? Stockpiling is almost always worth it. To make good amounts of gold you need to take risks. Taking risks is what is going to make you gold, You need to decide for yourself is the risk greater than the reward. If so, because about investing but if it's not; invest and invest hard. I'll give you an example, one of the most talked about topics in cataclysm thus far: Epic Gems.  

If Epic gems come from pyrite ore, those who heavily invested in Pyrite will be making THOUSANDS of gold literally overnight. It will be Glyphmass 2.0 ( except renamed Gemmass 1.0 ). The ones who didn't invest? They get zero. But what happens if epic gems don't come from pyrite ore? The ones who invested will have a way to make their investment as close to "risk free" as they can, in this case my guess would be they would diversify the ore and try to sell it all off as other goods ( Belt Buckles, Rare Gems, Volatile Earth, Etc )

Sure there are ways you can make sure your investments are "risk free" but there aren't a whole lot of options, and if they are most of the time they're limited and rely on a single item, thus bringing you back to square one; Risk.

I'll give you another example: Dirge's Kicking Chimera Chops. This recipe was said to be become a vendor item for a couple silver during the Cataclysm beta. What ended up happening? The recipe was NOT sold by a vendor and the quest line for this recipe was removed. Those who took the risky route and bought those 3-5k recipe are now selling them for much, much more than they originally paid for them. I've seen a couple go for as much as 150,000g on several servers via The Undermine Journal.

How much is too much? How much is too little?
You'll have to figure that out on your own. I can't help you out here, it really depends on what item you're stockpiling. When stockpiling for something big, you'll typically want a good amount of surplus. Trust me you don't want to have too little when you realize that you're getting a 2000% ROI on your investment. You want to have a "fair" amount when stockpiling anything, you'll want somewhere in the middle where it's not too little, but it's not too much.

On the other hand, don't dump all your gold on a single item. Rule #1 of making gold like a pro: Diversify. What happens if your investment fails? Nothing good I can tell you that much. You're left with too much of a useless item that simply won't sell. Unless you can diversify with said item you're pretty much screwed.

At the end, investing in risky markets is what has made me thousands of gold. Sure I've lost some gold due to some of my deals falling through the floor but the reward almost always comes out on top when it battles risk.