rediscovering the AH

When I first start playing WoW, I had a great time playing the AH. I use the Auctioneer addon extensively and used it to buy low and sell high (most of the time). Occasionally I'd make a bum purchase, but I think that's to be expected. I guess when I started playing my priest in earnest, and when Blizzard made it so that you had to be a high level enchanter to disenchant high level items, I kind of gave up on playing the AH.

Well, the other night I rediscovered the fun. It's nice playing the AH when you've got 600 or so gold to work with. I can make some larger purchases and hope to turn them around for a tidy profit without worrying about running out of funds, since there is very little on the AH I can't buy at this point if I feel it's a good deal.

On my first night back on the AH, I already made a boneheaded purchase by trying to corner the market in Greater Magic Essence (I think that's the one). My fundamental error was blindly trusting Auctioneer to give me perfect information. It said that there were very cheap items available. I looked, and sure enough, compared to what I had scanned, there were a lot of cheap lots on the AH. This should have been a red flag right away. One cheap lot means someone is underpricing. 50% of the items being "cheap" probably means that Auctioneer has data which is not complete. I proceeded to try to corner the market (mistake #2) and bought up all the "cheap" lots. Long story short is that I'm taking a bath on them. I think my total losses will be less than 10-20 gold when I actually manage to dump everything I picked up, so it's not a hard lesson, but it's one I won't forget, since I hate having to truck around 5-6 stacks of worthless (to me) enchanting materials that I paid too much for.

Anyway, even with the mistakes I've made already, I'm having a blast playing the AH again in between Kara runs. Hopefully I'll get my methods tuned up and have an epic flying mount in no time! (I currently have about 600 gold and probably another 2-300 in stuff that I'm trying to sell). I think I started with 650 two days ago.