Investments & Bracer enchants

With the new bracer enchants and me posting a loss on the recipe having only made back 3k or the 15 I spent I figured I should take today to talk about how I learned from my mistakes. One of the most important things in playing the AH is learning from your mistakes and not making up excuses. I screwed up on this investment and lost about 12k on it. Even though I can afford to that's not the point. In short I forgot one key piece of my own advice that I've given in the past. Do your homework!


As we all know, an investment is when you spend money now to make more money later. But what some tend to forget is that you have to actually use what you invested in to make the money back or else it's a loss. The simple example is you buy a raw inferno ruby for 100g and turn it into a brilliant inferno ruby. You just made a 100g investment and you have to sell that new cut gem for more than 100g to make a profit. If you just sold an enchant scroll for 500g but vendor the gem you still lost money on your investment.

When it comes to investing, it doesn't matter that you're making money. The important part is where that money is coming from. When you primarily invest in materials, it's a lot easier to make mistakes and not notice if/when you lose out on something because the same gem gets used for many different cuts. But when you buy a recipe for, oh I don't know, a 15k bracer enchant recipe, things take a turn. Here's the way it works.

You drop 15k on a recipe, be it a new bracer enchant or 30 spell power from MC. You now have a 15k investment on that enchant spell and ONLY that one enchant. All the money you make from every other enchant in your book has zero effect on your investment. So you need to sell that single enchant on a scroll or for tips enough times to make 15k profit on the materials. And once you have you -still- haven't made profit from it, you have only made back your initial investment. Yes you can still be in the black come the end of the week, But you still haven't made any profit from that investment what so ever.

This is why it's so important to diversify. Don't put all your gold in the same coin purse as it were. When you branch out into several different markets, you can afford to risk your gold on more investments. When one turns out to be a bad idea you'll still be turning a profit thanks to your steady cash flow from other professions. These investments are a necessity though, as you'll spend a year or five trying to hit the cap just safely doing daily quests and nothing more.

So what of the new bracer enchants? If you can pick them up for like 5k or so then I'd say go for it, but anything more and you'll be waiting a very long time to make your money back on them. However this is entirely dependent on your server population and progression. If you have many guilds regularly clearing content then there's a lot more gear that is "worth" putting this enchant onto and more crystals to be used on it. Unfortunately on my server horde side, there's only 2-3 big raid guilds and only one of them has cleared everything on normal mode.

Because of that these enchants won't be profitable on a scroll for some time to come. However if blizz keeps up with the "free purples for everybody" style the wait won't be too long if you bought one. When the next patch comes and everybody gets suited up in new purples they'll have a ton of points left over to spend on gear that will get DE'd into crystals which will drastically drop the price on them. In addition to that there will be a lot more "worthwhile" gear around that people can justify spending this much on enchanting.

With the new heroics dropping purples the price will be going down after a few weeks and people get "epics" for their 10 alts these will be worth visiting again. They might not be a viable market on a lot of servers still, but I'll be checking them out once prices bottom out again. However if there's another gear reset you can be assured that when that happens these will be much more valuable.

In short if you spend a ton on these, all is not lost. Just wait for crystals to drop a ton when the new heroics come out and you can make your money back. And always remember what you're investing in has to make profit or you have turned a loss. I don't expect to make my money back on that investment for at least another two months. But we all make mistakes and so long as we learn from them there's no reason to get down about it or have that scare you off from future risks and investments.


Thanks for stopping by!