Morning all,

I noticed for about two weeks pre-3.3.5 that the epic gem market was crashing through the floor on our server. Then, oddly, for a period of 2 weeks someone kept buying up all--as in ALL--the runed cardinals and reposting, driving the price back up to the 150 mark. I have 2 theories as to why this might be, and figured it would be useful to get your feedback:

1. It is a JC trying desperately to re-inflate the market and after two weeks he simply gave up, cut his losses and ran.
2. A farming/gold guild passed by on the server, cleaned up for two weeks then moved onto a new server to avoid detection.

I'm trying to understand this odd "blip" in our market and would appreciate your thoughts?

Probably speculation on increased demand, with the new raid-instance comming out.
Thing is, that it's so easy to get epic gems these days, that it makes it a bad idea to try inflating prices by buying them up.
Better idea to inflate prices is to abandon a market for a while, if you're a big enough player, scarcity will set in and prices will increase again.

Standard strategy, new raids generally mean new gear and an increase in sales of consumables and item enhancements. Often people run out of stock during the rush, meaning if you have stock you can be the only one selling at the expected inflated prices.

Doesn't always work, but normally pretty reliable.