Main Strategy of the Commodities Player, Part I

I would say that there's three main ways to make a profit off the auction house:

1. "Passive" - low risk / very low volume / low yield - this is a tactic that most people employ automatically. You see an amazing deal on the AH, even if it's something you don't need, and immediately scoop it up and re-post it. It's low risk because you know you are going to make a significant amount of gold from it, but it's also low yield, because deals like that are few and far between.

2. "Market Manipulation" - high risk / high volume / high yield - this is what most people think of when talking about 'playing' the AH. It involves doing things like buying up an entire commodity so that you can repost them at a much higher price and inciting other artificial market manipulations. This strategy can potentially yield a lot of gold quickly, but it's also high risk, especially on a very populated server, because the amount of new product entering the market every hour may hot be something that you can keep buying up indefinitely. It's very easy for this entire strategy to implode and cause great losses.

3. "Commodities" - relatively low risk / variable volume / high long term yield - this is the strategy I employ. It involves watching your particular AH to select the commodities that have consistent high/low prices over the week, and are very volatile within those price points. In future posts, I'm going explain my strategy for selecting commodities, as well as the buy, sell, and hold rules for those commodities. If you do this right, you can make a lot of money without investing much time, but it's also a long term investment that requires you to tie up a lot of gold in commodities that you may hold on to for days or even weeks in special cases. Also, like any kind of investment, the amount of money you can make is directly proportional to your initial investment. If you are starting small, it make take a while to make a lot of gold.