Cornering the Trading Post Parts Market (Speculation) (Auctionhouse)

After you have the Trading Post Level 2 you can farm the parts to make an auction house in your garrison. Looking at the number of Universal Language parts (Ashran) sold on your realm each day is a good way to estimate the number of people that are trying to actually activate the Trading Post AH instead of the majority that just immediately list the parts they find. The demand tends to be lower for the Nagrand/SMV and Auction Control Module parts, but this can shift as people progress beyond heroics as well as less people leveling. If someone is planning to build the AH, it's likely that they don't intend to farm all 18 parts, so that's where you decide what parts to corner.

If you have a decent amount of gold you can start buying the parts you think might affect the ecosystem. Since you need all 18 it's likely you already invested a lot of gold to get the missing parts from the AH, so you probably wouldn't think twice about paying a few extra thousand more than you were expecting for a piece you don't have. When a certain part is saturated on the AH it can drop to under 1k. I wouldn't suggesting pressuring the market for these common parts because more will come in to undercut you before you can move the price, but you can try hoarding or flipping the "hero undercuts". What you want to look for are the parts that aren't getting posted on the AH as often during the time frame you want to speculate. What I did was try and farm them for a couple days and tried to see how the AH listings compared to my drops. Hopefully there is a part you can start to corner that will be in sync with your farming. Sometimes you will be lucky enough to start gathering a few of the parts that the AH seems to be lacking. This might seem like a good time to go ahead and sell them while the value is high, but it's not a mat so you will start driving the price down quick if you want to post more than one. Instead I just buy out most or all of that part to create scarcity. Enough people will always be looting mats, so they will usually start the undercut wars before you can establish anything, but the Trading Post market is typically much much slower.

I'll give you an example of my though process so this seems like an actual guide instead of common sense or stupidity. On my server most of the Cyclical Power parts get listed about 8-10 times a day while a couple of them only get listed about 4-5 times a day. Of those two they both have an estimated demand of 1-2 sold per day, so technically they should be valued the same price since it's an identical world drop rate and the amount available to the realm is equal. The key here is the randomness of what parts people have already obtained before, but keep in mind that most people aren't willing to farm for one missing piece when they're likely to find ones they already have first (Logically you sell those to buy the ones you need). So since there are only a handful posted a day for the 2 parts I'm looking into, I can try and manipulate the market by buying and hoarding them. I chose the one part that is selling for 1-3k on average instead of having to shell out more gold to corner the other that averages 3-5k a trade. Since I know that there is an identical supply available of ~4-5 listings a day, I estimate that they should be worth about the same amount of gold. It's possible the cheaper part has listings lingering from an undercut war that haven't let the low demand for these parts catch up to them. There is always going to be at least one guy that is looking to finish the Trading Post AH that day, so you can get a sale from him but since there are so few of these sold a day it's easy to create a longer lasting impression that the part you are hoarding is valued as a rare piece compared to its counterparts. When people browse through the ones they need they will scoop up those cheap 1k parts, and then when they look at your listing(s) they will assume that its higher price is due to a low amount farmed that day as well as considering what parts the other players already have and intend to keep.

The only reason I'm doing this is because I think these items have a chance of being deflationary for a decent amount of time or at least hold their value. I think a lot of people see these drop consistently over time, so they assume that eventually everyone will have what they need and prices will drop. However, I don't think they factor in that by the time that people actually want to build these or have the gold for them, the supply will have decreased because those players will be doing end game stuff instead of leveling or farming up the world drops except for maybe the Ashran Universal Language parts.

Sometimes this is working out really well for me and coincides with the parts that I'm farming and other times it feels risky as I stash a lot of a certain part. Today I bought up 5 of this one part for about 1-4k throughout the day and I've staged the price at around 8k to try and lure in others to post around 6-7k. I've sold 2 so far today and the market price has definitely moved as newcomers don't just show up and undercut for 1k again because there was already a pretty low availability of the part and they would rather chase higher profits. I don't think it's safe to try and corner more than one or two parts unless the available supply is pretty low, but I hope this works for you if you have been farming multiples of the same parts and don't want to start undercutting yourself. I would also advise posting multiples from an alt because it won't seem as scarce when someone has 2 or 3 of the same one.