Thread: Strategy: Cornering the ore market

I'm here to share with you all a simple yet bold strategy, including my experience with possible strengths and weaknesses and potential for improvement.

I'd like to thank the following Wind Traders for helping point of flaws and provide ideas for this strategy: @Stede , @Aeg and @Z-Man . This strategy is not a unique snowflake, but it has been implemented in one form or another, by at least the aforementioned WTs.

Introduction
When I hit 1m I was faced with the usual "what now?" question. I was considering 2 different options; either reroll on a new server and start from scratch or continue and do more daring strategies. This strategy has carried me from 1m to 1.5m, so it has been tested and tried.

Background
I see a lot of comments around these forums of the type "just got XXX stacks of ore for XXg". I also see a lot of comments (and whining) about too high ore prices.

To me that sounds counterintuitive:

• If you get low ore prices, so does your competitors and the result is competition at a lower end product level
• If you are faced with higher prices the resulting products will naturally increase in price, so the margins remain the same. Additionally, higher prices will scare off a lot of competitors, potentially leaving better margins

One of my fellow Wind Traders said it best, though unfortunately I can't remember who said it: "I don't care about the price of ore, all I care about is the profit margin".

Basic strategy
Based on the above observations I started to formulate a strategy: I wanted the price of ore high; to scare off casual prospecters (as these often refrain from buying 100+ stacks at 40g while they wouldn't hesitate at 20g).

If I consistently buy everything at 20g then the price naturally moves upwards and my competitors are forced to buy at 25g. This means that I will be able compete at the same level as them and still retain higher profit margins or even underbid them to the point where they it is no longer profitable.

At this point there are two main roads to pursue:

• Increase the floor value to retain the relative advantage
• Clean out everything to starve the competition completely

I am on a medium population server, I have a big bank roll and I wanted to have fun, so of course I opted for the latter

Buy buy buy
When I started the ore prices where down to ~20g/stack and I simply bought everything below 40g. Most days that would be in excess of 10k ore and sometimes up to 20k. I also contacted known farmers and tried to have them CoD to me instead of posting at AH (at lower prices). It wasn't so much a matter of needing it as keeping it out of the hands of my competitors.

I consider [Obsidium Ore] and [Elementium Ore] equal in price and both must be bought to have the desired effect. [Elementium Ore] is better for gems, while [Obsidium Ore] is better for enchanting. The supply will dictate the amount you get of each type. But for me all my [Obsidium Ore] was spent on [Stormforged Shoulders]

The amount of ore I bought was completely impossible for me to process, but I didn't really care as I could see the price of [Inferno Ruby], Enchanting mats and Scrolls climb day by day. Every time I left the computer I would start a smelting or crafting session, to try to process as much as possible.

Sell Sell Sell
On my quest to 1m I was a bit selective on what I would sell as I didn't prospect, so I only sold scrolls with a profit from AH mats and only sold the occasional [Heavenly Shard]. With this strategy I was drowning in enchanting mats, so I lowered my values for the mats and started selling every scroll from Cata mats down to my crafting values (these were a lot lower than my competitors for obvious reason). Additionally, I sold [Greater Celestial Essence], [Hypnotic Dust] and [Heavenly Shard] in huge amounts.

The philosophy on the selling side is to keep as high a turnover as possible and simply burn through as much ore as possible, even at slim profit margins! The idea is that you flood the market with low priced goods so the shuffle becomes even less profitable for everyone else.

I regularly checked TUJ and noticed that my chars where almost always #1 recent sellers for the following items:
[Enchant Weapon - Power Torrent]
[Enchant Weapon - Landslide]
[Heavenly Shard]
[Greater Celestial Essence]
[Bold Inferno Ruby]
[Delicate Inferno Ruby]
[Brilliant Inferno Ruby]

Prospecting
This is without a doubt the weakest link in this strategy. You need to be able to process absurd amounts of ore. I would recommend multiple accounts and having the secondary accounts prospecting while you play through The Consortium Key Sender or similar AHK scripts to send key strokes to multiple instances of WoW. This can be either while you work, watch movies or play WoW on another account.
I prospected while at work with WoW in the background. Surely not the intent of the ToS, but certainly within the limits of the letter of the ToS.

Market adjustments
This is perhaps the most important part of this strategy. If people see the ore prices consistently above 45g then they will start farming (or rather load up a farming bot). So as you increase the floor value, you have to be prepared to buy more.

Also be aware that if you are flooding the AH with goods then your competitors are not able to unload theirs. They will sit on goods that are not moving as well as they did a couple of weeks ago. So there is no point in trying to get every sale, but a majority of the sales should be sufficient. You want your competitors to sell their stockpile, but want them to hold back on getting a new.

Conclusions
I was so impressed with the effectiveness of this strategy that I just had to keep going. When logging on and seeing 15k ore, I would shrug and buy it all, knowing that every stack of ore in my mailbox would be one less in the hands of my competitors. This is actually a really important point as you are not buying for yourself but rather to limit supply.

This strategy is actually a lot less risky than it seems. It just requires a lot of capital to invest and keep investing. For the first week or so I was losing money consistently and then it started stabilising, while building a formidable stockpile of gems and enchanting mats.

Now that I have decided to freeze my accounts I have stopped buying ore and the result is profound: Almost immediately the price of all derivatives crashed. Gems, enchanting mats and scrolls all lost 30-40% in a few days. I had encouraged farming ore, but when my demand disappeared the supply exceeded the demand and the pre prices plummeted. This lead casual shufflers to reenter the market as the prices dropped to their thresholds and thereby drove the prices down again.

Improvements
If I am coming back I will definitely pick up this strategy as it was incredibly fun (not the prospecting, but the market manipulation and emptying the fat inbox). But there are a few things I would improve or some variations that can be explored.

This strategy is particularly well suited to implement in the lull between major content patches. You are exhausting the stockpiles of your competitors while building a big nest egg for the patch rush. I would recommend starting 3-4 weeks before the content patch hits i.e. now for 4.3

The fact that the market crashes when you let go, can be used to your advantage. Some would advocate going through cycles of where you don't buy to let your competitors back in for a while. Then they will consider the market manipulation to be the natural fluctuations and refrain from buying next time you drive the price up. This will make the next peak cycle more profitable as you have taught your competitors that the price will come down again. It will also prevent the prices from keep on rising indefinitely. This idea was conceived by @Stede , but I didn't employ it myself.

When starting I would recommend not selling at all. You are aiming to drive the prices up (and it will work) so you want your competitors to drain their stockpile while you increase the price of ore. With luck you will end up in a situation where they are dry when the ore prices stabilise at the peak leaving only you with a massive stock ready to flood the market at high prices.

This strategy is only really works if you are the only one doing it, otherwise you will not achieve the same effect if someone else has the same 50k+ stockpile as yourself.

There you have it! Enjoy and please report back about your success and failures as well as feedback; improvements and observations.

must say, great post.
I managed to thrive on this strategy for a while too. It works sublime. There are 2 factors however which should be brought into the equation:

- Available playing time
- Number of ore bots around on server

The fact you are able to prospect whilst being at work is a HUMONGOUS advantage. Gief your job! =D

Since a few weeks the ore bots are back on my server and its almost impossible to buy it all out, for me that is. A suggestion could be you do a Co-Op with a friend who is also into the goblin bussiness. This way you profit both and your "radius of action" gets bigger (timewise and quantity-wise). This could be a tip for more casual goblins or peeps that CBA to go full out on this strategy (spes with loads of ore bots around on server).

After I hit the 1m cap I scrapped this one of my strategylist mainly because it was so time consuming. Since jaspers and allicite are often dumped so cheap I dont even bother prospecting anymore. Just the occasional low priced carnelians and pyrite give me enough Infernos for 4.3.

P.S. I own a logitech G11 keyboard which lets you script keysends also. It works great for prospecting/milling/disenchanting [item_id]

//Pwnshopper - Aery Peak [EU]

@Nilaus
Nice post. I did the same on my server as i noticed that the ore prices went down from 40g to 20-30g per stack. I bought thousands of stacks each day, and i have spent ~200k on Ore alone atm within the last 2 or 3 weeks. To the most ppl, this has to look like i'm insane. I keep buying and buying, without being able to burn through the stuff at once. But as you mentionned - that's not the real point of that strategy.

I see it like this: When the new patch hits the servers, there's a time-gap between "needing ore" and "being able to farm ore". You need a LOT of ore (and the resulting products), but the time to get them is limited. So Ore prices will be high for quite some time. If you're still sitting on hundreds and thousands stacks of Ore, you win!

At first i was a bit afraid, because - as mentionned - i spent 200k on that strategy. But i got enough stock for 4.3, and in addition i keep selling the mats. Thx to me buying all the low-level-ore, i can create Heavenly Shards for ~35g. My competitors undercut each other within seconds by 1 silver - from 99g down to 89g! It's sick. And since i don't WANT them to do that, i post a wall of shards at 70g. If they keep doing it again, i go down to 60g. Most of the time, they stop at this price. So i get 25g profit out of every shard (at least!).

I could only wish i had to worry about 40 a stack for ore, it would cheaper to buy elemen bars and folded obsidium that the buy ore and make my own.

I'd love to do this. However, there are a few factors that make this strategy not viable for everyone:

- You have to be online pretty much all the time to buy up all that ore.
- Sometimes even if you buy up all ore at 60g the farmers/bots will still post at 30g regardless. In my experience I've never been able to directly contact any of these farmers/bots for them to send them to me directly.
- Some people hate shuffling. Personally, I want to remove as much of it as I can from my goblineering.
- Unless you're one of those people who stockpiled 6 bank tabs of Maelstrom Crystals before the Maelstrom shatter was announced, you're probably still going to be limited by these for enchant scrolls unless you unload raw GCE/Dust/Shards on the AH.
- Basically, any of your competitors who already have a massive stockpile will probably make just as much money as you, only that you had to invest the brunt of your liquid gold into ore which you probably can't use

On the plus side:

- Since it's practically impossible to process all that ore, I'd probably simply give it away to my guild's bank. They already supply all gems/enchants/consumables for 5 separate raid groups.
- Higher ore prices (usually) means higher profit margins which is larger GPH for shuffling, especially when red gems are involved.
- Carnelians -> Carnelian Spikes and Carnelians -> Inferno Rubies become much more profitable as well.

Edit: Funny thing, shortly after this thread was posted looks like the ore prices on my server have gone up. Can't wait to make oodles of cash off whoever just bought all the ore :P

I wouldn't call it cornering the market, but I've had various amounts of success screwing with the truesilver bar market since truesilver is a rare ore spawn, and alchemists don't bother transmuting it since it's not profitable, and to further discourage them, I think it still has a cooldown. Basically, I would slowly build up a stock of truesilver bars when I saw them really cheap. Then, if I ever noticed the auction house with just a few bars/stacks for sale, I'd buy them all up and then list a bunch at varying extremely high prices in varying stack sizes. Then I'd immediately undercut myself from another account with single bars priced much less, but still WAYYYYYY over normal market value. Using this strategy, I've managed to sell individual bars for up to $20 EACH.

I'm pretty sure that Truesilver is still required as part of leveling Jewelcrafting and possibly Blacksmithing as well, so if you get bars listed at a high price when someone is itching to level their profession, you can cash in.