Incription - Selling Inks

I've heard some positive stories about milling Cataclysm herbs and selling the Inks for an amazing profit so I obviously had to check it out for myself. I started out with creating an Excel sheet just like the one I made for ores and realized a decent profit could be made indeed.
Not wanting to take a large risk I bought about 2.500 gold worth of herbs from the Auction House (10 stacks of Twilight Jasmin). After milling I had 61 Blackfallow Ink and 10 Inferno Ink and I proceded to list them all on the Auction House.

It wasn't worth the effort on my server, eventually I did make a profit from selling the Blackfallow Ink for 1.595 gold and the Inferno Ink for 2.150 gold but it took way too long. I think I've had a break of luck with the Inferno Inks because they where all bought by the same dude.
It took about three days of re-listing before all the inks had sold, not my idea of a market in which huge profits can be made. Even more so if you consider the current state of the market, prices are still fluctuating a lot so I'd rather put my money on a more risk free market.

I've combined the Cataclysm profit sheet for herbs with the sheet I've made earlier for prospecting ores, a preview for this sheet below shows I could make a decent profit per stack of Whiptail if I'd be willing to wait for the Inks to sell:


WoA stars for this market:

Profit
Risk
Hassle

I'm not impressed at this moment, the sales volumes are too low and the risk is too high. If the prices for herbs drop a bit it might be worth checking again since milling can be done semi-afk and the inks can easily be sold from APM groups.

Patch 4.0.6 - New meta gems incoming

I was going to do a post about milling herbs and selling inks when I noticed this lovely bit of information:

Jewelcrafting

• Meta gems with the Chaotic and Relentless prefixes now have a requirement of 3 red gems.
• New meta gems have been added: Agile Shadowspirit Diamond (Agility/3% critical damage), Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond (Strength/3% critical damage), and Burning Shadowspirit Diamond (Intellect/3% critical damage). These new recipes are unbound and can drop from any Cataclysm creature. The new meta gems have a requirement of 3 red gems equipped.

Source: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1765534540

Three new meta gems which will probably be much better for dps than Chaotic (basically fixing and making in worthless in one step).

This information means three things for Jewelcrafters:

1. Stock up on meta gems, if you want to profit from the undoubtedly high demand for these meta gems you'll need a large supply of them.
2. Get the designs asap, the first to cut them will make the most profit. Monitor the Auction House after 4.0.6 has been released and be prepared to spend thousands on these designs (and hope to make that investment back).
3. Stock up on Inferno Rubies; Chaotic, Relentless and the three new meta gems all have three red gems as a requirement. This probably means a lot of blue/green/purple rare gems are going to be replaced by Brilliant, Bold or Delicate Inferno Rubies.

I'm going to prepare for this by doing all three of the above steps. I might even buy loads of Carnelians to be transmuted to Inferno Rubies by my Alchemist but I'll have to do a pricecheck on that first since herbs are quite expensive on my server.

Addon spotlight: MySales

My sales for this weekend, data collected by MySales

Download link: MySales

I absolutely love this addon! After it's installed and you've collected your first sold auctions from the mailbox you can open the main window by typing: "/ms window". It'll tell you how many sales you've made and exactly which sales you've made and how much you've earned since the addon was installed.

It can also tell you who your buyers are, so if one name pops up a lot for a particular item you might want to check out what's going on and/or make a nice deal to become that person's supplier.

The feature I'm most exited about is on the last tab, items sold. With this information it only takes seconds to see which items are your top sellers and for how much you've been selling them:

Enchanting: Buy now, sell later

Just a random selection of enchants with threshold set to current market values

Many Enchants are currently priced way under market value, from the small example above let's highlight Enchant Shield - Blocking. This is an Enchants requiring 12 Hypnotic Dust, which on my server are 15g each on average. The Enchant should be worth about 200g yet due to increased supply from people leveling Enchanting it's currently available for a bit short of 12g.
I've bought about 50 scrolls of this particular Enchant so far, every single one below 15g. My reasoning for this is since there is only one alternative (Enchant Shield - Protection) which in my opinion is inferior to this one. Demand for this Enchant is going to increase while supply is going to decrease. However, don't forget prices for Enchanting mats are going decrease as well as lesser mats are needed to level professions. For this Enchant I'm buying risk free, Hypnotic Dust will never go as low as Infinite Dust did halfway through WotLK due to inflation. Infinite Dust bottomed out at 1g 50s on my server which calculated back to 18g for the Blocking Enchant.

The risk for every single Enchant can be calculated like this. When calculating also keep in mind there will always be people leveling Enchanting and they will dump their scrolls on the Auction House. If that supply beats the demand for a scroll it might never recover from the price deflation we're currently experiencing.

Note: It's probably going to take many months before reaching your ROI for these scrolls. Do not invest if you want some quick easy gold!

Prospecting values Excel file

I've got a day of work so I created an Excel file which estimates the profit for prospecting Cataclysm ores based on current market prices for full stacks of ores, basic gems and enchanting mats. The base for this file was taken from Drockrock's post on the Consortium forums.

The Excel file can be found on Google Docs: Prospecting Value Excel file

By posting this on the Internet I can't prevent anyone from copying and distributing it so anyone wanting to do just this is welcome to do so. If you want to share this, please share this blogpage or do not change the header in the Excel file, I'm a starting blogger and would enjoy a bit more traffic :)


Preview:


Update 06-01-2011: I've added meta gems to the sheet as well, as you can see on the pre-entered values (which are actual prices from my server) they easily have the best profit margin.

Price resets

It's time for a well known trick used by auctioneers to increase their profits. Resetting the price of an item to be able to sell your own supply for a larger profit margin. I've been sitting on a decent amount of Greater Celestial Essence from disenchanting Carnelian Spikes. Which I'm still expecting to be fixed soon btw, an Item Level 317 weapon which disenchants reliably in 2-3 Greater Celestials doesn't seem to be right.

The supply I had however had been created during the weekend when Obsidium Ore was quite cheap. Unfortunately during the weekend the Greater Celestials were also at about 60% of normal market value with loads of them posted. I figured I just had to wait untill Monday or Tuesday for them to rise to their normal price again. On Monday the lowest buyout was 60g and Tuesday prices had risen to 68g. This morning there were still a couple of them listed for 70g buyouts, but only about 15 of them.
Since there was a large gap between the 70g ones and the rest, which were a little above market price, I decided to buy out all 70g buyouts and re-list those and my own for 85g.

If all of them sell, which they will over the coming days, I didn't make 225g (15 x 15g) from relisting the 70g buyouts but 1.125g from relisting them and increasing the price of the 60 I had in my bank.

This applies to every item for which the price fluctuates during the week. If you want to sell them for the normal marketprice you can choose to not wait for the cheaper ones to automatically drop off the Auction House. Buy them out and reset the price to increase profits.

Disclaimer: I could have bought out as many Greater Celestials as possible during the weekend and re-sell them once the price had risen again. Once the market has settled a bit after Cataclysm I will do that but right now I'm being very careful with buying to re-list. Prices are all over the place, it only takes one or two other Jewelcrafter / Enchanters to start doing what I'm doing and prices will drop significantly. I'm not going to risk having a stack of Greater Celestials which I'm going to have to sell for a loss.