After the success and attention that yesterday’s post brought, I am encouraged to keep posting. In fact, Markco dedicated a whole post to telling me and all other readers, in so many words, to keep writing. (Thanks for the feedback and encouragement Markco. It is very good advice.)
With that said, there is a specific market that simultaneously manages to fascinate me, frustrate me, and leave me totally confused. The market, of course, is the market for Netherweave Cloth. I am confused because netherweave market was supposed to die. It was one of the first things I predicted here. Before me, Zekta predicted it here. I’m sure I cribbed the idea from Gevlon, who wrote a post in August 2009. (A post that I now can’t find, but if I could, I’d link to it. My google-fu is weak today.) Zekta, in the comments to my first post, even backed up the logic when questioned by Dacheng. Rather than restate, allow me to just put their own words here.
Dacheng: “‘Netherweave is drying up because everyone in the Outland is flying’”, said BigJimm. I’m afraid I don’t see much evidence of this. There’s just no shortage of netherweave on my server, and the prices reported on http://www.wowecon.com don’t show any sign of inflation. Bigjimm also says “I mean, you all know that netherweave cloth is going to skyrocket, right?” Well, I would think that the future tense is wrong here. Either Netherweave cloth already has skyrocketed, or it isn’t going to. This is not news. On my server, this isn’t even history!”
Zekta: “The reason we(I) predict a short supply on August is that.: People is flying instead of walking on outland, the major supply of the Nether weave is not from farmer (You’ll make far more gold by farming other thing than Nether weave cloth), but from Leveling player.”
So, there’s the logic. It seemed totally sound at the time, and even now seems solid in retrospect: people leveling their alts will be able to fly, and therefore won’t kill as many mobs that drop cloth. Unfortunately for my theory, the reports of netherweave’s death were greatly exaggerated. Here is some of my data for netherweave cloth:

And here is what it looks like on the bag market:

This is from today. I buy about 3-30 stacks of netherweave a day. I sell 6-25 bags a day. There’s a lot of fluctuation in this market in terms of volume, and I KILL it on the weekend. But… why?!?!?!?!
Why?!
WHY does this still work?!
This strategy has been beaten to death. It’s the first one that I heard of when I was a broke AH n00b. I clean up in this market and I don’t even have a tailor- a friend of mine makes bags for me in the morning when she’s drinking coffee. I send her 25g every time I have her make me bags (12-50 bags at a time, generally), but she’d do it for free if I needed her to. I also send her other things as thanks: and extra 200g here, the occasional toad, etc.
Yes, I understand that netherweave is a commodity. We’re not talking about a rare enchant mat that’s kept artificially high by a few niche AH marketers (yeah, I’m looking at you Euripides*). Anyone can go get netherweave, but who’s doing it? Where is the cloth coming from? Who is supplying it? And why are they selling it at 5g/stack in stead of making into bags and selling it for 9g-12g/stack (minus the 50s cost for Rune Thread, of course). Are people farming it? Are that many people leveling? Is it just people doing TBC content (ie: Isle Dailies, old heroics, etc.) for achievements? Is it just Adam Smith’s invisible hand, working the price down to the norm that the market remembers? I have no idea.
This market isn’t one that I care about- it’s a relatively small volume of money, and I’m personally more interested in Jewelcrafting. But I can’t believe that this still works. The predicted spikes in netherweave just never happened. Dacheng was right, and again, I was wrong. I would love it if anyone could explain why.
*And as a final note, I’d like to say that I was also particularly gratified personally to see that Euripides took the time to comment in the JMTC post. He, along with Markco and Faeghleis, makes up one third of the trio at the excellent Call to Aution podcast. He also writes Wow.com’s “Goldcapped” article and hosts the Hunting Party Podcast. I have gushed about Markco already, but Euripides is equally skilled, thoughtful, and entertaining. I consistently enjoy his work, to the extent that I, a warrior tank, actually started listening to the Hunting Party Podcast (mostly just to laugh at you silly hunters and your adorable ability to train warm fuzzies and inability to stay alive, but I digress…). I think the word he used in his comment, “tenacity,” is particularly appropriate. We’re not talking Wintergrasp tenacity, we’re talking about tenacity to keep posting after making a public gaffe. Tenacity is the best single word that I can think of to describe the success of JMTC and it’s related other content, and I’m flattered that Euripides too the time to type it out.
GL! /bow