Owning the market or does the market own you?

One of the biggest mistakes I see from people who think that making gold in the AH is only about buying low and selling high.  They read somewhere that you have to “own” the market by buying it all out and then controlling the prices which means you can charge high prices and people have to buy them from you.  So, they go and scan the market and come across something like Wool Cloth and see that there are maybe 30 stacks of it in the Auction House all selling for less than 5 gold per stack.  They buy it all.  They then go back and list it all for 100 gold per stack and wait for their gold to roll in.

And they wait.

The gold never comes.

They go back and look in the Auction House and find that there are now over 100 stacks of Wool Cloth selling for as little as 2 gold per stack.  So they buy it all.  Now they have over 130 stacks of this stuff listed and they keep looking for those sales to roll in, but nothing happens.  They go back to the Auction House and see another 50 stacks listed and they buy it all again.  Someone keeps listing it as fast they can buy it, the prices edges up over time but never gets to the price point that this seller is hoping to get.

What happened?  The premise was faulty to begin with because they cannot control the supply of most items in the game.  The biggest issue here is supply.  You cannot own or control a market that has an infinite supply generated in the game.  In the example of the Wool Cloth, it failed because there is no end to the supply of Wool Cloth as long as someone is willing to go farm it, pull it out of their banks, or is leveling a toon and getting it as drops.  Since a server has tens of thousands of people on them, the odds are against you having a situation where no Wool Cloth exists except for what you have listed.

People will pay higher prices but they will not pay ridiculous prices so the experiment fails and they end up getting stuck with stacks of materials, get frustrated and dump the items into the AH for a loss and tell everyone that you cannot make money in the AH.  If you do this method then you will lose gold and miss the opportunity.

Even in the rare cases where you are able to get this type of method to work, you will take huge losses most of the time which would offset any one time gains.

I will share how to use market leverage and timing to buy low and sell high in a future article, meanwhile don’t make the mistake like so many others and think that you can control a market and make thousands.  You will only end up making me thousands of gold!