Daaaaang

I had high hopes. I looked at the glyph market and thought, "hmm, I bet with the 4.0.1 patch, there will be a pretty big surge in demand for glyphs moving forward." I gambled.

For the two weeks running up to the patch, I stockpiled inks, bought the market clean on herbs, and even bought out my competitor glyphstock. For those two weeks, I only sold glyphs that I could list at 30g or more, and I used the profits from those sales to further buy up more market share. On the weekend before the patch, I pulled my entire stock so I could figure out just what I had. I also took this opportunity to create two more storefront alts- with three alts, you can have one stack of each glyph in inventory without running to the bank.

By the time Monday night rolled around, I had at least 20 copies of each glyph in the game, with at least 30 of each of the Death Knight and Paladin glyphs. I had more in certain glyphs, approximately 30% of the market was below 10g, I bought all of those.

I went into this two week rush of activity at about 20k gold, give or take. I took all the profits I had made from the runup (about 4k) and reinvested them back into the Plan, and I ended up eating about an additional 3500 gold out of my principal buying out my competitors.

That's where I started on Monday night: 16,618 gold, and about 7800 auctions posted. I didn't want to go too far below 15k, as that would be my safety net for Cataclysm and 310% flight and all that jazz. I also was not able to play straight up to server shutdown, as I was visiting friends, and also had to get up fairly early on Tuesday morning. So I didn't quite have the market cornered, but I went to bed Monday night feeling like I could do okay.

I posted all my glyphs at 40g each. No undercutting, no price inflation. Just a flat 40g, 48 hour duration. I figured that there would be enough demand to eat through undercutters, and the new nerfing to automatic auction posting would probably keep supplies relatively low.

It has been 48 hours since the initial posting. I have collected all my mail of expired glyphs and gold from sales. It took over four hours to collect all my mail and relist all my auctions- I am keeping the same posting plan for now, as I predict a fair amount of constant demand until well after the weekend, as people get back into the game, finish downloading, and importantly, get around to glyphing their alts. I have not resupplied my markets yet, as I'm low on ink and don't have the time to mill / queue / post right now.

An aside: ZeroAuctions is the successor to QuickAuctions. Go to curse, get it. Yes, there's more clicking now, but there's nothing to do about that. Canceling in particular kind of sucks.

The big reveal- after 48 hours of sales? Well, really more like 36 hours of sales?

There we are. About 65,000 g in revenue. Pull out the (approximately) 9,000g in expenses incurred during the runup, and I'm at about 56,000 in profit. Not bad for a few day's work. I have since reposted a LOT of glyphs, I'll see where we stand after the weekend is over. All in all, I'm glad I made the gamble.

EDIT: After scanning the AH, it seems like I'm sold out of a few glyphs, but after scanning the AH it also seems like there's no herbs to be had at all. So I'm going to have to be happy with what I've got listed, which is probably a good plan. After next weekend (probably after the tuesday maintenance) I'll go back to a regular posting regime - 2 of each with undercuts and 48h duration, with quasi-regular repostings to keep undercuts current, until I can sell through all my existing stock. Then I'll take account and decide if I should retire or not.