Doing Your Research The Right Way (TUJ Part 1)

   Have you found yourself in a place where you happen to have a few characters all with their own set of professions that can make you gold but whenever you tried to craft something for a profit you simply can't seem to get it sold due to some weird cruel joke the universe is playing on you and instead of making gold you end up loosing a bunch of gold in the end, or so that is what you think. Well there are ways that can help you get these things to stay in the past and you to get on the fast train to profit town.

   So what you need to know so that you can avoid loosing gold and knowing what's a good place to invest is a bit of a good ol' homework (market research), and don't worry you wont be doing any complex algorithms nor reading tomes of useless junk, no you will be using the one and only TUJ (The Undermine Journal) for this.

   Once again where we will try and elaborate a bit on the whole idea on how to get an idea on which market you should get into that will make you all that gold that you crave for. I will try and cover a few aspects of the professions that can make you gold and by using those examples i'm pretty confident that you will get the right idea and the right info on what's going to work for you and ultimately make you gold, so lets get started. ( FOR THE PURPOSE OF THIS POST I HAVE TAKEN A RANDOM SERVER INFORMATION EU-SUNSTRIDER (Horde) IN THIS CASE BUT IN FUTURE POSTS I'LL CHOOSE DIFFERENT SERVERS SO YOU CAN SEE IT'S NOT SERVER DEPENDENT )

   Ok so firist thing you want to do when you want to start a proper research on the market in general is see what you have, what you can make, and how well you can sell those goods that you can provide. So for starters lets say you have an alchemist that can make pots and flasks, now that you know what you have and what you can make you need to see how profitable that is going to be for you and is it worth it that you invest time and gold into it. The right way of going about this is first thing you need to do is go and type in in your web browser

http://eu.theunderminejournal.com    FOR EU Servers
http://theunderminejournal.com         FOR US Servers

and once you are there you need to get down to choosing your server, because that's the server you want to make gold on.

   Once you have arrived here you need to get your mouse in the Consumables rollover section and from there choose the Alchemy (or whatever other profession you want to check prices on) as you can see is shown on the image on the left.

   Once you've gotten yourself here there's a bit of information written down on the starting page as a way of explaining what is what, i wont go into details as to writing down what it is because it is very self explanatory and it's all laid down on the site so take a moment and read the legend there.

   Ok so you've read the legend and you are watching at those numbers next to the items in the left and wondering what is what, well keep on reading then.

   So after having read through the legend and getting an idea what Avail, Mats, Price, Mean is you can see that there's a bunch of numbers in there that some are green and others are red. Well what this is basically a street light effect telling you if there's profit to be made then it's green if there's a loss in making that item it's red (pretty simple huh), so as you can see lets say you want to try and get your feet wet by selling some flasks on the AH what do you sell. We can see that Flask of Steelskin, Winds and Draconic Mind all have a cost (mats worth) of about 20g to make while selling them at an average price 40ish gold. So this means that on every single flask you sell you get a 100% profit and that's quite good to be honest, but take a good look at the availability which shows is that there are 200 300 or even 500 of those flasks up on the AH which means if you are thinking of getting into that bit of the market then get ready to brush up your elbows off the competition for that piece of the profit pie.

    For the sake of argument lets say you didn't like your odds about the flasks and you want to try something else, maybe your spec in alchemy is as a potion master and you want to make profit by selling potions, then what you do is take a peek at the potion prices.

   If you see the prices there you will notice right away that there's some sweet profit to be made in the potions corner of the market as the crafting prices of the potions is 1-4g across the table while many of them are selling for prices raging 4-16g per potion ( take a look at the Potion Of Treasure Finding it sells for 140g, and yes that's the one that when you drink it it gives you a chance to acquire those Tiny Treasure Chests that usually contain volatiles, cloth, greens and gold ). So as we can notice if you were on that server and had alchemy you could make some good profits by jumping in on the potions market.

   So we started off this post with the assumption that you had alchemy, what if your lets say have a Leatherworker that you want to use to make gold with what do you do ? Well same as with the Alchemy first thing you choose the Leatherworking from the Enhancements rollover and from there you get the chart for leather working.

   Just like we saw up on the chart for alchemy we can notice the same setup here as well, in the first column you have the availability on the item on the AH at the given time, followed up by the cost of the mats for the crafting of the item ( that price is taken from the current price of the given mats from the AH at the given time ) and then you have the profit/loss column, but as you can see on the image which portraits the PvP gear that leatherworkers can craft it's green from top to bottom, well with the exclusion of that one item there but that's besides the point.

   This whole way of checking out which items are worth buying and investing in can be done safely before you ever have to invest a single piece of gold in a commodity you don't know how it's going to pan out by simply doing a bit of research which shouldn't take you more then 5 min and in return save you thousands of gold and net you those huge profits. Best thing about using this site to do your research is that you can do a quick research just about any item of interest being that you want to invest into materials so you can craft items, or if someone wants to sell you a piece of gear but you don't know what it's real worth is this is the place to check it out on.

   And so we come to the conclusion that by using our brains and actually doing the bit of a research on the matter we can get a pretty good idea as to what items are worth investing time and gold in, be it that it's alchemy, leatherworking, blacksmithing, jewelcrafting or anything you might think of we can be sure that we will make profits and by taking those given prices we can know a rough estimate of how much exactly we can expect to get out of our investment.

    So remember before you go buy buy buy do your research so when the time for sell sell sell comes you don't go QQ QQ QQ.



   And like always keep your eyes peeled for good opportunities out there.