Molsan Method

I was alerted of a severe underselling of one of my go-to items while performing a routine scan of the Auction House this weekend. The price on Huge Emeralds was extremely low and I decided to buy up everything for resale. While I was excited to see the potential profitability of cornering the market with this item, I was disappointed only to find eight Huge Emeralds for sale.

Timing is Money, Friend

Timing is once again key when making this kind of decision. Quoting myself, if I may, from my last article:

Identifying the item is only the first step. You will need to time your purchasing of the items when there is just enough of an abundance where sellers are undercutting each other, but not saturated enough to the point where supply overwhelms demand. All I can say is this just takes a combination of experience from attempting this process on your own, scanning and observing auction house trends, and having an intimate knowledge of several crafting professions.

You can’t always predetermine the item you’re going to corner the market with. You will need to build up an arsenal of knowledge of items to monitor and strike hard and fast when you see an opportunity.

Read on to see the results from this week’s experiment.

This Week’s Item: Huge Emerald

As with Lesser Moonstones, Huge Emeralds are difficult to farm because they are a random drop from a mining vein or prospecting the raw ore. Typically, you will obtain these emeralds from mining a Thorium vein or prospecting Thorium ore. On most servers, Thorium ore is outrageously priced, and the competition is high for the veins themselves.

The demand for Huge Emeralds can be high not only because it is a material for the Emerald Lion Ring, but because this recipe is key for Jewelcrafters leveling from 290 to 300. Players power-leveling this profession will see the light at the end of this tunnel and will become desperate to reach the crafting level of 300. They’ll often overpay in order to reach this goal so that they can move on to the 300-350 level recipes.

The Results

The first five Huge Emeralds were purchased at 4:00 am for 12.6 gold each and listed for resale at a 120% markup for 30 gold each. By the time I had logged back in at 5:00 pm to check on them, they had already sold earlier in the day!

I decided to check to see if any new items had been listed and three more had been put up, astonishingly enough, for 3 gold each. Yes, 3 gold each. I quickly snatched the last three up and listed them again for 30 gold apiece. The next morning, all three had sold. For a little more than 10 minutes worth of work, I turned a nice 161 gold profit (after auction house fees).

Summary

It doesn’t take a large quantity of items to corner the market and make a nice profit. By studying some guides, watching trends, having patience, and splashing in a bit of luck, you too can find the same success.