Profiting Off Your Competition.

Well yesterday was a really nice day. I decided I was going to level my shaman strictly via paying for runs through instances and got to level 26; still a long ways to go but its a start. I posted glyphs only 3-4 times throughout the day (my usual is 5-7 times) and posted a good 20-30 stacks of dust and 75 or so essences. By the end of the day I had made ~2k off glyphs (which I think is my new daily high) and ~3k off enchanting mats. I let all my gem auctions expire so I had 0 gems up for a small portion of the day and only made 200g or so from them. The reason I didnt stay caught up on the gems is I want to let the market reset. My other competition will most likely buy up all the cheap gems and repost em allowing me to come back into a fresh market and aggervate them some more.

Today I'll talk about how to profit off your competition before they are even your competition. Many professions have bottlenecks in which it gets really expensive to level through and you can make it even harder for future competition and in a sense get into their head.

I'm going to focus on jewelcrafting for an example but every profession has something similar. In jewelcrafting your bottleneck is at thorium ore. I think it's pretty much accepted that on most servers thorium is pretty pricey. Even more so now that people are leveling quicker and the RAF.

Large Opal, Huge Emerald, Azerothian Diamond, Blue Sapphire, and Star Ruby are the common gems you get while prospecting thorium. You will rarely get outland gems and generally will get 4-6 gems per stacks of ore.

Now your server will vary of course but I'm going to use my server as an example where thorium ore drops down to 40g at times. This is when I buy it up and prospect it. On my server all the gems minus blue sapphire and star ruby sell for 15-20g each. Blue sapphire and star ruby sell for 10-15g. The average value of prospected gems I get from thorium ore is about 55-60g.

By no means is this a huge profit and you may have to repost 2-3 times before the gems sell but they will and when they sell generally you'll sell 90% of them at once due to someone leveling JC.
Now the thing I like about this the most is in a sense you already getting into your competitions head. What I mean by that is that if your competition knows they are buying gems and other goods off you to level up and then they get to wrath quality gems and see your name everywhere it might intimidate them from going full out.

Also another positive side from buying thorium is it keeps the price high on it making it even more spendy for future competition.

Like I said there are bottlenecks in every profession like that. Some of the others I know off the top of my head that you want to check out is high end vanilla enchanting mats and outland enchanting mats; Also greater nether essences on my server sell for 90g per 10. Mageweave cloth is also a well known choke point. On my server this goes for 10-20g a stack. For herbing pretty much all the mid to high level old world herbs sell really well. I've been able to sell an abundance of blindweed (among other kinds) for 30g a stack.

Just something to keep an eye on and snatch up the good deals in these markets. It also provides a nice side income to simply investing a little bit of cash when the prices dip low.