Milling time...

I felt I had no clue about what the prices were of inks and in the next step what my lowest glyph price could be so I decided to investigate a bit. I bought a large number of herbs off the auction house and started milling, carefully noting the results.

I went through the lua-code of Auctioneer and made the below small macro to easily find what the herbs cost.

/script s,l,h=BeanCounter.API.getAHProfit(player,"Deadnettle",time()-86400,time()); print (s);

The above macro will search BeanCounter for all Deadnettle auctions the last 24 hours (60*60*24=86400). Just replace item names and time number as needed.

The result from my milling are displayed below:

...	total	ppe	ip	ap	lo	ap
438x Deadnettle	204g 52s 06c	46s 69c	34	238	3	203g 11s 98c
300x Icethorn	139g 00s 00c	46s 33c	39	187	0	139g 00s 00c
3450x Adder's Tongue	2459g 76s 65c	71s 30c	372	2075	0	2459g 76s 65c

ppe = price per each herb
ip = icy pigments from the milling
ap = azure pigments from the milling
lo = leftovers
ap = actual price paid for the herbs deducing leftovers

	Cost/IotS	IotS/mill	Cost/Snowfall Ink	Snowfall Inks/mill
Deadnettle	1g 70s 69c	1,37	11g 94s 82c	0,2
Icethorn	1g 48s 66c	1,56	7g 12s 82c	0,33
Adder's Tongue	2g 37s 09c	1,5	13g 22s 46c	0,27

IotS = Ink of the Sea

Have you done any similar investigations? If so, what were your results?

The netherweave experiment ..

As I promised last week I would present the results from my week's experiment with netherweave. I wanted to post this yesterday but I wanted one more scan day for the cloth, since I come to think about include it in the scans first on Wednesday.

Due to lack of time I've not continuously refined the cloth I bought which had a nice side effect as I now know that during this week I bought exactly 8799x Netherweave Cloth. In bags alone these have a market value of about 5500g.

I started the week with a full vault slot of Netherweave Bags. These had sold out on Friday. During the week I cautiously siphoned the auction house for cloth and leaving the odd stack there to keep the prices down. The main reason to siphon the market in the first place was to starve the competitors for raw materials so that it would bring the bag prices up.

The results from the week's measurements are displayed in the below images.

Netherweave Cloth

 

The careful siphoning of the cloth did produce the desired results and more. My aim was to keep the cloth prices stable but the trend is now that the prices are dropping.

Netherweave Bag

I like to think that the siphoning of the materials have had the desired effect on the bag prices as well. The trend is clearly showing the prices going up.

I made this a simple experiment with a market that I know by heart by now. The strategy in itself can be applied to any market I think.


I'd also like to put out a question for you readers. The gone by week I've sold for about 20k and invested about 10k. Are these good, bad, acceptable numbers? I've no comparison at all...

_______
Update:

I decided to create 128x bags out of the materials and convert the rest to enchanting materials. Now 3 hours and 10 minutes later I have the results:
5x Large Prismatic Shards (market value 6g41s50c each)
76x Greater Planar Essence (market value 18g08s29c each)
542x Arcane Dust (market value 2g91s10c each)
Total market value:  2984g13s74c

What's love got to do with anything?

So it's world event time, again. I totally missed this one coming as I usually do. I haven't stocked. I haven't done anything to squeeze more riches out of it. Regardless of this I still see my steady income of around 1200g per day. I think that the main reason is that I play my main as a completionist. I want her to be as complete as possible when it comes to recipes and achievements and thus my main focus has been on what to do with her during the world event and kind of forget about my sweet small auction mole.

Last night I tried out the bracelet farming tip in Ulduar, that WoWConfidential wrote about. It works like a charm but I later found out that I couldn't mail the braclets or even list them on the auction house. So these now silently occupy my main's bags. To sell through the trade channel is not something I usually enjoy. At least I can look forward to not have to farm anymore of those bracelets during this event.

Anyway, the 1200g is from minimal effort; relisting twice a day from my previously built stock. I wrote about that I had too little gold that I couldn't expand the market and since then I've slowly accumulated some.

During this week I'm also conducting a little experiment that I will present on Saturday. I've also found new bigger players to the glyph market, not sure about their percentage though, but they list for about 15k.

I also converted a big stash of Bolts of Netherweave. I tried to craft another item this time, Netherweave Pants, to see if the materials gained from nuking these were any better than the other ones. These materials actually sell a lot faster. Quick calculations though show that buying Netherweave Cloth at 40s each and selling the enchanting materials does not give me a profit. The only thing I do is to siphon the market to remove competitors and, unless I'm storing the piles of bolts, this seems to be the cheapest way of doing so.

Long week, new ideas...

I've been awfully quiet for awhile and the main reason being those bullies in Booty Bay that require me to work more than my fair share over the past week. (translated: IRL + work + overtime = no play)

Anyway, short update: During the week I've at least relisted my stock twice a day. This has given me about 1k - 1.2k gold per day. But with my listing value of about 6.5k I think it's quite good and points to that I don't have that much competition in my current markets... right?

I've stopped siphoning the market for Netherweave Cloth which is starting to show. I now have 5 competitors in the bag market and the prices have dropped from about 12g each to 9g50s currently. I've started tracing the prices now and will start siphoning again. The real problem being that I can't really store that much cloth (bolts). I've tried the suggested "tailor something and nuke it" to sell the materials but I find it being a non-profit approach with my realm's prices.

My siphoning strategy is now to buy all cloth at a price below 40s each but not 40s. I may experiment at leaving a few cloth at lower prices to keep the prices down. For example, leaving a few stacks in the 25s-35s range. I will list my usual 30x bags. Relist them at about 19:00 server time and then again at about 23:00 server time and undercut my competitors while doing so. During this week I will with interest follow how the prices move.

I've also continued leveling my inscriber. She's just entered Outlands and I still enjoy the feeling going from the old world through the dark portal. She's currently at skill 300 and have learned all minor research recipes. I've transferred all herbs from my banker's vault to her for milling. It was about 2 vault slots full of herbs from an earlier project of flipping all level 60 to 70 herbs. These being the leftovers and I ended on the profit side anyways so I use them for leveling my inscriber.

My glyph market

I did a quick investigation of the glyph market on my server as I'm leveling my inscriber. I must say that I'm not too happy about the results. There is one player that have near 46% of the whole glyph market. I'm asking your input into this - is it even possible?

Competitor	Number of glyphs	Purchase value	% of total purchase value
Gimli	204	2439g 88s 04c	4,55%
Dean	247	3901g 09s 00c	7,28%
Druge	272	4870g 15s 70c	9,08%
Hibo	1424	24522g 81s 24c	45,74%
Other	1373	17883g 57s 55c	33,35%
Total	3520	53617g 51s 53c	100,00%

* I've given my competitors fictional names.

What I'm now wondering is if I really should bother leveling my inscriber with this daunting competition. How does your realm look like?

Finding ways to empty leftovers...

As I wrote yesterday I was low on pure gold and also that I had loads and loads of small stacks and leftovers. These actually come from previous endeavors and leveling alts that I've sent stuff from. Without any real strategy of what to do with it I've just stored it in the vault. It's a mess and it needs to be cleared out.

I started out by trying to find a way to dump all of this using QA by creating a "!Junk!" item group. The reason for QA in this case is that it's so easy and fast to relist with. Didn't really find a way to maximize stack sizes in the setup as I added all the junk items that obviously can stack in any number of different ways. As an example, how do you combine Dark Iron Scraps (250) with Enchanted Leather (20) in one single QA item group? I didn't find a way so I had to rethink...

As I use Auctioneer I thought of using batch posting instead, it's slower but gets the job done. I didn't really get the undercut thing to work as I wanted. I've set markdown to -20% but it didn't undercut by my specified 1c regardless of what I did. I'm sure it's doable but so far I've not found a way.

Another problem I'm having is Azure Moonstone that's currently listed at Min/ea 3g04s17c and Buy/ea 3g33s33c. When I mouse over I get that the market price isn't available. But... it's right there, is it not? As a result of this, Auctioneer proposes 26s32c/bid/bo. I couldn't add this to the batch list in the end as I've not yet figured out how to set it up...

Since I'm now using QA and Auctioneer to post items I can no longer trust the 'check for undercut' functionality of Auctionator. The reason being that QA will always undercut or not post at all while Auctioneer will post at the lowest allowed from settings. I've used Auctionator to make choices whether to cancel the auctions or not, depending on how many items the undercutter undercut me with. Be it 1 item and I've listed 5 I may not cancel as that 1 item will sell fairly soon and then I've the lowest price again.

The spring cleaning has taken several hours but now I start to see some patterns to what I stock. I've also realized where the profit is not; Netherweave Bags. There are just not enough margin. I buy as stack (=1 bag) off the auction house for 9-10g. Add the rune thread to that production cost. I can put these up for around 11g due to competitors. A lot of time spent, relatively, with a 50s-1g50s profit. Well, it does not really make me happy. I will but my bag business on hold for now and see how the market plays out.

The thorium prices shot through the roof last night and the same guy who sold ores at 95s each now list them at 1g75s each. I wonder if that guy read our posts too? Anyway, I built a stock of gems that are selling fairly well with normal competition. I've configured snatch for the ores, maybe I get lucky?

A lot of ranting in this post as well but as always I'd like to give you an insight into the auctioneers life.. :-)

Low on gold...

I've been blinded by all the tips I've read about and wanting to try out that I've run very low on gold. What I mean is that it's a bit too low for my comfort levels as I feel I can't really make a quick push into a market and flip the prices for a quick profit. I will have to slow down a bit and stick to my routine which currently is to buy netherweave cloth to make bags and also create nukables of the leftovers (thanks for that tip Bullcopra). The other routine I picked up a few days ago also seems to work, about the thorium prospecting. This seems to work well for Bobreaze as well (check out his prospecting test).
Anyway, it's weekend at last and I plan to empty my vault of junk to clear space and regain some gold for future ideas. It'll be fun...