Molsan Method

One way to make some quick gold on the auction house is to corner the market. The risk/reward for this method is very high, but, if done correctly, can be extremely profitable. I hope to turn this into a weekly series where I choose a different item each week and report on the profitability.

How to Corner the Market

The goal here is to find a particular item, buy all of it low, and resell all of it with a decent markup. You will need to take many factors into consideration when doing this so you don’t get stuck with an item.

• Try to find an item that is in recurring demand and not easily obtainable
• Find an item or a material that is regularly sought after on a daily basis
• Try researching profession leveling guides and see if there are tiers where a particular material is needed in bulk

What to Avoid

You’ll want to stay away from items that can be farmed up with little effort. Copper Bars, for example, are a bad choice. Unless you time it just right and find someone power-leveling Blacksmithing, Engineering, or Jewelcrafting, you’re going to be stuck with these. There are usually a few pages worth of bars already on the auction house, and it can be expensive to buy up the market’s share of Copper Bars. I’ve tried this before with Tin Bars and it didn’t work out so well.

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

This Week’s Item: Lesser Moonstone

For this week, I chose Lesser Moonstone. This item is difficult to farm as it is most commonly found as a bonus drop from mining tin, iron, silver, and gold veins. There is also a chance of receiving one from prospecting the raw ore. I would rate Lesser Moonstone as a material that is in “medium demand,” as it is a key component for several low-level Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting recipes.

Lesser Moonstone is in recurring demand, especially for a Blacksmith specializing as a Weaponsmith. The Moonsteel Broadsword is an objective for the quest The Way of the Weaponsmith. Four of these swords are required, consuming twelve Lesser Moonstones in the process.

The Process

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.

The Results

On the evening first day, I purchased 48 Lesser Moonstones at an average price of 1.38 gold each for a total cost of about 67 gold. I posted them at a 110% markup of 2.9 gold each with a stack size of one. The next morning, I noticed that I was being undercut, and snatched up 33 more at an average price of 1.2 gold each for a total cost of about 40 gold. Rather than undercutting myself on single stacks, I re-posted them for 2.5 gold each, but with a stack size of three.

By the time I logged in later in the day, several of my auctions had closed. Not yet 24 hours later, 57 out of the 81 items (70%) had sold! Not taking auction house fees into consideration, those sales yielded 147 gold. Having spent 106 gold to buy the mats, I was already looking at a 41 gold profit with 24 items still left for sale.

The next morning, I received nine more auction house sale receipts for a total of 25 gold. At this point, I was already in the black and could have purchased all the items undercutting my last twenty-six items, but decided to just let them expire.

Summary

Here’s the breakdown of my activities for a 48-hour auction. This was a decent experiment to test the viability of cornering the auction house in today’s WoW market. Next time, I’ll choose a more valuable item and share my results here.