The Flipping Market

for other ideas on the glyph market and other general tips see the free Croda's Inscription Gold Guide

The Flipping Market can develop into a business of its own.

It gives lumpy income but develop this broadly enough and the lumpiness starts to blend and provide a nice steady high level of earnings.

For me this is becoming one of my major income streams and is starting to challenge Enchanting as my number two earner.

Flipping, quite simply, is buying items off the Auction House and reposting them at a higher price.

My strategy here is to look for items that are priced way below the fair price, buy them and then repost at a good level below the fair price.

Therefore i am targeting 2 markets - those that want to use the item and those that want to flip again.

I am aim to buy for 5 gold and sell for 500 gold, or buy for 2000 gold and sell for 6000 gold, or buy for 4000 gold and sell for 10000 gold.  Not buy for 30 and sell for 100 or buy for 500 and sell for 800.  I want a few big winners not many small gains with this strategy.

The reason is that I will occasionally make a mistake and so will use up storage space for a while before I either make that sale or cut my losses and post at a very low price.

I don't have to buy every time i check the Auction House.  Indeed i don't even buy every day.



What is my method?

I use the Undermine Journal to scan for items that are priced substantially below their mean price.

Step 1:

I look at the Undermine Journal Deals Page – it scans the Auction House every 70 minutes.  It lists items under various categories showing the item, number available, lowest price on the Auction House, Mean Price and Standard Deviation.

What i am looking for are items that have a high mean price and are posted more than 2 standard deviations below the mean price.  These are the items that are likely posted on the Auction House too low and can be flipped.

Graphically, the Undermine Journal shows this with the gray horizontal like representing the mean price plus or minus two standard deviations with the black blob representing the current quoted price within this range.

Step 2:

When i find an item that looks interesting (=high mean price and current price more than two standard deviations below the mean price) then i investigate further my clicking on the item.

This opens a new Undermine Journal page that shows me the recent history and additional data on the item across other realms.

What i am checking for here is to make sure the item has not recently spiked in price (i.e. the price has not been manipulated higher to give a false high mean price) and that the mean price is also high in other realms (so further proof of the item’s value).

Step 3:

I also click on the item on this second Undermine Journal page to take a look at the WoWhead page.

What i am looking for here are to firstly make sure the item cannot be bought from a vendor and secondly to read the comments made to determine if this is a rare drop and not made out of date by a more recent item.

Step 4:

If i am satisfied by the prior steps then i buy the item and repost it at the stated mean less 1 standard deviation.  I post the item for 48 hours using Auctionator.

in this example the item sold within 24 hours:

So far, as a rule of thumb, the higher the mean price the quicker it sells.