JMTC Wow Gold Forum

On my server there’s a somewhat famous (at least among us AH resellers) toon named Erosonne who seems to be a significant presence in every single market at once. I’ve long since concluded that he was either a guild bank toon or gold seller based on the sheer volume of his sales.

However one thing that confused me was when he single handedly tanked Chilled Meats market. For weeks I watched him unload 25-50 auctions of the stuff at a time pushing the price ever further down. From 45s a piece, 35s, 32s, 28s, 18s, 12s… crushing the market with a steady unrelenting pressure by posting truckload after truckload.. until one day he stopped and the market bounced back up.

Now the thing is I can’t figure out is… why? The artificial depression was quickly filled once the level of supply was gone, so he could have doubled the money he made simply by stringing it out a bit. Chilled Meats is a quick selling market so it’s not like he’s trying to offload rare pets (side note to Enchanted Broom: SELL CURSE YOU!) and his inventory would still have emptied out soonish.

The way I see it either he
1) Wanted to clear his storage toons out in a week rather then a month and was willing to eat a 35-65% loss (relative to what he could have made)

2) He knows something I don’t

I mean I made some cash by purchasing meat on the downturn and selling during the bounce (alas not as much as I should have, not knowing what was going on scared me off a large investment). But I just can’t see his motivation… when one of the largest sellers on your server makes a crazy mistake like that you just start to wonder.

What I’m wondering is it possible to tank a market, switch from selling to buying at the low point… and make money?

I wouldn’t have thought so but it’s all I have without going into the inexplicable.

I think I pushed the prices down so that he could buy the chilled meat cheaper and make it into something. If he was posting about 10 auctions a day and buying 20 I guess he would make money.

But I really do not know. It's strange what he did.

He could possibly have been clearing out his bank and guildbank because he was leaving and then giving the excess gold to a friend. I'm guessing he didn't really care how much he was putting them for seeing as the gold didn't make much differnce to him.

If he sold 10 and bought 20 he's be driving the market up since the supply is still going down.

And he's still selling items so it's not that he was moving....

I just have no idea what he was doing

Jhaman is probably right.
Everyone makes mistakes, and he wanted to get rid of these chilled meats...

And he doesn't probably needs lots of money, since he's a well known AH dominator.
He didn't care and sold his chilled meat.

Btw: Pretty interesting of you to watch this Guy...

My question is this: what is the supply of chilled meat like normally on your server? If you're getting several hundred meats a day on there he wouldn't need to hold it for a very long time to make a profit. If you do this with flasks, for example, once they are selling for 50% of what the normal price is you can start to buy up everything and I imagine even if you didn't hold it very long you could make a sizable profit as long as people are putting a lot of flasks up (if not you need to hold it longer, obviously).

That's just it, the chilled meat market moves quickly... Instead of tanking the market he could have unloaded for a week, let it recover for a day or three, then offload a large number more. Given the quantity if he doesn’t have a plan it means thousands of gold worth of loss there.

But that's an interesting thought Atalar... I'm not good at math so I'm going to doodle a train of thought here, if someone better then I at basic math skills wants to check my work I'd appreciate it.

Ok to simplify the problem I'll say he has 100 CMU (Chilled Meat Units) to sell... Starting price is 10s

As he drives down the market it looks like this

Price 10s: 100 CMU > 90 CMU = 100s
Price 9s: 90 > 80 = 90s
Price 8s: 80 > 70 = 80s
Price 7s: 70 > 60 = 70s
Price 6s: 60 > 50 = 60s
Price 5s: 50 > 40 = 50s
Price 4s: 40 > 30 = 40s
Price 3s: 30 > 20 = 30s
Price 2s: 20 > 0 = 40s (He didn't totally tank the market to 0)
Total Earnings = 5g 60s
Total possible Earnings = 10g
Total Losses = 4g 40s

Now 4g 40s = 440s / 10s = 44 CMU… so once he’s tanked the unit he needs to rebuy 44 CMU and hold it until it hits 10s in order to break even… I just can’t see that happening. It’s only possible if you assume that the market will stay depressed at the 2s level while you rebuy almost half of what it took you to depress the entire market in the first place.

I know I must look somewhat obsessive but I don’t think I can describe the sheer volume of the tanking. For weeks he was a solid two pages of listings by himself. For the losses he incurred he could have built a guild bank for a alt, bought up 5 tabs, and used that to store the meat and trickle it out.

It’s a lot like seeing Warren Buffet buying up majority shares of AIG or GM… it’s such a stupid move by a competent man that your brain refuses to believe that there isn’t some sort of angle there.

I agree with what someone else said earlier, he was possibly tanking the market on purpose to buy them cheaper in order to turn them into something so that when he sold that something, his profit margin would be larger. when you think of it this way, it wouldn't take long for him to hit break even point, especially if this market is very fast moving and recovers fast, then the impact on whatever he is changing the chilled meats into would not be very large, so he wouldn't begin tanking that.

I can see this simply because i considered doing it to the thick leather market in order to make incredibly cheap nightscape headbands to DE, which normally yields about 200% profit, but if i tanked the market it would go up significantly.

my 2 copper

Makes sense in theory... according to Wow head Chilled meat is used for 3 non-quest items. The only one of em that's useful being the great feast (which you have to be a cook to use) so I doubt that’s it

Now the quest items use 1-4 chilled meats and are used for the cooking dallies... once again this makes sense in theory but given the scale involved this would produce enough cooking daily fuel to power ten cooks for a year.

Course I suppose it could work… You dump your over supply onto the AH, buy enough of it at the low points to use to fuel the creation of quest items, and trickle those into the AH or use yourself with the value added to offset the initial losses.

End result a break even/slight loss/slight gain at the AH and a much faster dump of stock onto the AH.

I have no idea if that’s what happened… but I can accept it at least.