Market resets is one of the most intriguing possibilities for fledgling goldmakers. 3 days ago I spent 1.3 million gold resetting EU chronocloth bolts, let’s see if it was a good idea.
Resets are risky business
I can’t go into a video on resetting markets without prefacing it with saying: Resetting is incredibly risky and the #1 way to lose large amounts of gold. A quick search on reddit will yield tons of stories like this one. But we’ll look at what needs to be there for a reset to have a chance of being successful.
What the hell is a reset?
Resetting means buying out all of the auctions for an item below a certain price point to “reset” the price to a higher level. It can be very profitable, but it can also be extremely risky.
Enter Sunday
On Sunday I decided to reset q3 chronocloth bolts. There are a couple of reasons why, and they are:
#1 awakened order had stabilized at a high price, making it unprofitable to craft bolts at current prices
#2 I could increase the price by 50% for 1.3 million, so my risk was limited (relative to the 60 million I have on Draenor).
#3 People can’t mass craft bolts, and they are unlikely to sit on huge stockpiles of q3 materials.
Results so far
I sold bolts worth about 300k on Sunday, keeping the price at 1200 gold but having to work really hard to get sales. The price has since gone down, and as of right now I have sold about 400 bolts. With current q3 prices I’m likely to lose gold overall, although it’s fairly close to break even.
Did I go wrong?
I’ll probably at least break even, but I severely overestimated the sale rate of q3 bolts. Even reposting actively for 3 hours I could only sell about 200-300 bolts, when I had bought 1600 of them. This massively increased my risk as the awakened order has started falling, which makes crafting profitable at a lower price point.
What do you need to know to reset a market?
How quickly can other people flood the market?
Can you sell out enough stock to guarantee a profit before the price starts falling?
I had full control of the first question, as I was consistently almost always the cheapest q3 bolts all of Sunday evening, but the sale rate just was not there. I probably got 90% of the sales at least when I was reposting on stream, but that was not enough to guarantee a profit. I’ll now be watching the bumpy ride as the price fluctuates over the next week at least before I sell out.
Addendum
Since I wrote this a week ago I have sold bolts for about 1 million. I then did a slight oopsie and sold the remaining 500 bolts for 5g each as seen below, so I ended up losing 300 000, but it was a pretty funny mistake all things considered.
