3.3 The Bear Slumbers

Yes, you read that right and no, I don’t have any beef with Ferals. The Bear is that elusive near mythical time in a market when values of goods are in decline. And yes friends, I’m happy to say the patch appears to have lulled the Bear back to slumber, enter the Bull.

Understanding the Bear and the Bull
The term refers to markets trending up (Bull) and and down (Bear). These terms were actually created long ago in Europe by fur traders, and later adopted by the London Stock exchange. All you really need to know is that in a Bear market, prices are in decline. During a Bull trend, prices go up. To better understand the origin of these terms, I’ve found a visual aid.

“In Soviet Russia, Beer eat you!”

What, Me Worry?
All kidding aside though, understanding these trends is important. One of the best ways to ensure future fiscal success, is to identify these trends as they’re happening (which means a lot of studying WoWAH comes in handy here, and Excel of course). It’s also important to remember that even though the market is in a time of ascent, you still need to be careful. The old proverb comes to mind “ne vendez pas la peau de l’ours avant de l’avoir tué” (don’t sell the bearskin before you’ve killed the bear) in other words: just because the market’s in an upswing, doesn’t mean you can’t lose your shirt.

In previous weeks, I’ve talked a lot about research and development time, and how important it is to your success. Of course, nothing teaches like experience. I imagine that few here reading this today can remember the first time you touched a hot pan, stove, or whatever. But the lesson of that failure is with each of us today, don’t touch hot things unless you want to be burned. This lesson carries over into WoW just as much as anywhere else. If you’re unsure of your success, test it out in a “controlled” way. If you’re unsure of the flask market, don’t dive headlong in with 10K invested and expect to turn a profit. Test the waters, it’s that old lesson again… when you get into a hot tub, what do you do? You put a toe in, make sure the water’s not too hot.

Testing the Water In Practice
This week I took my first tenative steps into the Flask market. There were several factors involved, first I had decided on 2 weeks R&D. This allowed me some time to build up Alchemy on a couple of my alts, as well as track changes in the Flask market itself. Since 3.3 was just released, I didn’t think tracking changes over the first week alone would give me a reliable test sample, and I was right. Sales figures over week one were somewhat skewed compared to the week before, and the week after. It appears that we’re now back to business as usual in the flask industry.

I also noted that on Tuesday when raids were forming something was curiously missing from the Auction House… Flasks. Yes dear readers. It was reset day, and Bloodscalp was in woeful need of flasks, who am I to disappoint? Armed with my research data from WOWAH and Auctioneer scans, I plugged in my data into this very useful spreadsheet from Whittaker on the JMTC forums. Below are the stats for one run of Flasks.

As you can see, even at a cost of 50g per Frost Lotus, I was still able to generate some serious cash off of this (assuming the Flasks sold). What I had to do was figure out a threshold, basically how little was I willing to make per flask for it to be worth my time. Last week, it didn’t matter. Because every flask sold out by the time our raid on ICC 25 was over. But the point is, I had to figure that I “may” have to lower prices in order to move my stock, especially since last week I unloaded a TON of Flasks in a very short time. The end result? I made 10K for the week after costs (including money spent on my warrior alts gear, and some tradeskill stuff).

When you’ve got your system worked out, you can start spending a little here and there. Just remember if you ever want to hit the cap, you have to earn more gold than you spend. Do that, and you’re on the right track.

The Bloodscalp Report

Flasks did well, and I got an opportunity to flip a bunch of Cloth this week too, thanks Abstraktion for your support. I did find however, that the specialty cloth though it does sell, doesn’t move very fast. It really takes some hustling to move it on Bloodscalp. So, thanks to this expirament I will definitely not be leveling up any tailors for cooldowns.

In closing, have a very happy (and safe) holiday.