Jewelcrafting as a cash cow

Getting my jewelcrafting up to 375 was hard and expensive. Buying random world drop recipes to be able to cut rare gems was even more expensive. But now that I got at least one recipe for every type of gem, jewelcrafting turns out to be a veritable cash cow. It involves some volatility of the random results, but on average the profits are great.

As example this week I bought 12 stacks of adamantite ore for 25 gold each, for a total of 300 gold. 12 stacks of ore means 48 uses of the prospecting skill, each destroying 5 ores, a quarter of a stack. But each prospecting gives one adamantite powder (worth between 50 silver and 1 gold), and on average 1 common gem, which after cutting I can easily sell for 4 gold. And on average every 6th prospecting gives a rare gem, which when cut sells easily for 50 gold. So out of my 300 gold investment I got 48 adamantite powder (ca. 30 gold), 50 common gems (200 gold), and 8 rare gems (400 gold), more than doubling my investment with very little work involved.

The only trick involved is to be patient, because prices often fluctuate wildly. If adamantite ore in the AH sells for much more than 25 gold, I don't buy. Although often I can get around that by buying on the Alliance AH instead, where the price evolution is independant from the Horde AH prices, and then transferring the ores via the neutral AH and my wife's account. Same holds true for selling, sometimes somebody floods the market with underpriced gems, and I just wait that out. By experimentation I found that 4 gold for common gems is a price where I usually sell the large majority of what I put on the AH, thus suffering no losses in AH fees. In cut rare gems my 50 gold price tag is rarely undercut, but again I'm going for low prices high volume, instead of pushing prices to the max and risking losing the advance AH fee.

Of course I did have setbacks, for example when one day I only got half of the rare gems that I would have expected. But even then I just came out even, without making a loss, with the common gems selling at least for enough to recover my investment. I was thinking of expanding my business, buying more rare random world drop recipes and thus being able to offer more different types of cut rare gems. But I bought my recipes over a long period whenever I could get them for between 150 gold and 250 gold. Meanwhile the prices for these recipes have gone up, and I rarely see any on offer below 400 to 500 gold. And there is always the chance that prices for ore will go up permanently and prices for gems down, destroying my profit margin. But for the moment I'm making good money with this tradeskill, which is unusual in WoW.