Behind The Scenes - Speculation

One of the best things about playing the auction house and being wealthy in wow is the ability to invest and take larger gambles to make even more money. This is commonly known to as speculation and today I'm going to talk about how I go about speculating.

There are a few numerous ways you can predict whats going to happen. A lot of it is simply paying attention to the now and noticing patterns. Other ways are reading patch notes or even holiday items for later in the year.

Here is something that I'm sure many servers are seeing and that is an increase in arctic fur. For awhile I couldn't figure it as to why there was this sudden spike in price where arctic furs have more then doubled in value. It wasn't until it was suggested in the IRC channel that we came to the conclusion of it being the sudden rush of ToC crafting.

Now I would say 3.3 we'll see a drop in furs until they release orbs like they did ToC but with the change in turning in leather for fur I don't think the spike will happen as much. But if you have an enchanter and a leatherworker why not stock up on some leather that you would normally buy for disenchanting and hold on to it? Worst case is you'll burn it up for enchanting in a few months. Best case is you can flip it for some nice profit. This leads me into the next two types of speculation.

Reading patch notes is basically like looking into the future for the winning lotto tickets and yet so many people DON'T read them. It's almost pathetic that nobody pays attention and uses this to their advantage. Sure titanium ore prospecting was known but how many people know there's 3 new glyphs coming from glyph mastery books? Read the patch notes and put 2 and 2 together. If they are changing something chances are you can make money off of it. For example leather to fur or saronite for titanium. Patch notes. Learn them. Love them. Live them? (couldn't think of anything else bare with me :P)

Finally one of the easiest ways to make money is off of holiday events. Look for non bop items to flip after the holiday. For example I'm buying up cheap jack-o-lanterns to flip the following weeks (even months) after the event ends. Why? Why not is the answer. I'm willing to take the risk in buying 100 jack-o-laterns for 1g each to sell for 5g each after the event. I have a year to sell them and eventually they will sell. Plus you never know when someone will need that item to complete their meta because they were procrastinating. Some of the items such as pets and recipes are huge money makers 4-6 months later. Winter helper pets on my server sell for 400-700g during the summer. How many of you bought up tankards to flip after brewfest? While I didn't personally (never really dropped below 1k on my server) I know a ton of people saved up tons of them and sure enough even on my server they are selling for double the price.

Speculation is based on knowing your server economy. Knowing the trends of the average player. You will lose on speculation often in the start. But when you hit the nail on the head perfectly its all that much sweeter. Speculation is a game all in its own. What else am I going to do with tens of thousands of gold?

Here's another little speculation tip that is pretty obvious. What happens when an entire server makes new worgen / goblin alts? 4 netherweave bags per person * 5,000+ people per server is a shit ton of bags. How much cloth have you stocked up? I personally have 2 guild tabs full and still buying :)