[Low] Hitting 10k Gold and exploring new markets

I wasn’t really prepared for it, but when I checked the remote AH this morning, I found a whooping 1,000 Gold of sales in my inbox. I knew I was somewhat over 9,000 Gold yesterday, so I swiftly logged in and Auditor confirmed it for me: I reached the 10,000 Gold mark. Now, I know where last night’s profits came from. I am constantly keeping 5 Arcanite Bars for 100 Gold posted, because I figured if one of those rich level 85 guys gets the Thunderfury or Sulfuras quest item, they want their legendary and they want it fast. So that’s 500 Gold on top of the daily 300 to 500 Gold I am making through Enchanting materials and glyphs. So while those 1,000 are accounted for, I am still somewhat shocked that it took so little time to get from 5,000 to 10,000 Gold. I’ll have to consult MySales tonight to check if I am not missing something here. Anyway, 20,000 Gold – here I come!

Hitting my second milestone has made the second topic of today’s post all the more urgent: diversification. I actually see operating with low level characters only as a great chance to learn something here. I can’t rely on the popular steady earners that level 75+ characters have access to yet. Both because none of my characters is even close to that range and because I don’t have most of the professions covered yet. So what this does is it causes me to be creative on a more basic level.

Because I can’t cater to the max level players directly (safe for some vanity items maybe), I’ll have to earn their and everyone else’s money through other means. What does every character have or need? Glyph slots (covering some of that already), talent points (no money to be made there), equipment (largely not available to me and to be covered later), equipment enhancements (same as equipment) and professions. The latter are what I want to be focusing on.
I have already partially catered to that market through disenchanting cheap items from the auction house and selling the resulting materials. While I sooner or later want to stockpile some of that and start selling twink and heirloom enchants, I am fairly sure, this will always be a somewhat profitable market with some foreseeable ups and downs. With the accumulation of more and more Gold, my ability to reinvest some of this also becomes better. So 2 to 4 weeks ago, the following would have been impossible or at least a bad idea for me to do.

I will start flipping tradeskill materials. Enchanting rods and pearls are nice and dandy, but I want to have such gimmick sales to complement more reliable and higher throughput markets, not the other way around. Over the next weeks, I am planning to set up snatch lists for all common types of ores, bars, herbs, cloth and maybe even leathers. I want to add those markets one at a time and get a feel for good absolute or relative price limits for the snatch list, how much of a given material can be moved on an average day, how prices vary over the course of a week or month and how much demand there is for each kind of material. So while I am not be able to make money crafting Mysterious Fortune or level 85 Darkmoon Cards, I may be able to take a few Gold per stack from the people doing so. I think I’ll start with the metal market, so expect a first update on that over the weekend.

In other news, my Hunter is now level 30, a blast to play and only 5 levels away from being able to be powerleveled to 300 Enchanting/Jewelcrafting. I foresee that character becoming the first one to enter Northrend. Also, I am seriously considering getting Embersilk Bags for my trader. I am still working with Netherweave bags, so the improvement would be 24 additional slots, that's half a mailbox of ended auctions or two letters full of items more. The improvement on posting and re-posting auctions should be noticeable.

As the closing paragraph today, I would like to pose a question. Have any of you experienced the bug in TSM, which causes the addon to not remember the characters and banks you selected to be included in the inventory check of TSM_Crafting? And if yes, how did you fix it?
It’s very annoying when I restock on Glyphs that my trading character still has plenty of in his bags, because TSM refuses to include that character in the inventory check.