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As you can see all those guys leveling new toons and alts skip trade skills on the way to 80. When they hit 80, they want to power level two trade skills all the way to 400+ in a few hours. This is where you get rich. Not on Titanium, not on Lichbloom, not on Borean leathers, it's the low level stuff that has the best supply or demand ratio.
That is to say, the amount of time it takes to get those things compared to the profit margin for selling them is often higher than the Northrend mats. You're able to get 20 stacks of light leather in the time it takes to get 5 or 10 heavy Borean. You can post low level mats over and over again for almost any price you like and they will sell, the reason is that listing fees for low level mats are almost nothing.
When you try to do what everyone else is doing, these holes in the supply end of your market become apparent. We were working up Alchemy, Tailoring and Leatherworking on DK bankers last week and there were 36 light leather and 13 Stranglekelp on the AH. That was all there was, and we needed maybe five or ten times that much. Since we have a lot of gold we could care less what the prices were, we would have bought them all and not even thought twice about it.
There is no such thing as a fair price. Fair is in the eye of the beholder. When we want to power level a profession we'll pay 20g a stack for peacebloom if that's all there is. It will still cost us a lot less gold if I pay Northrend mat prices for starting area mats because it requires so much less to get skill points out of that stuff.
If you don't like the high prices for entry level stuff go farm some yourself, you can use what you need and sell the rest. That is how a free market works.
If you know how people want to behave or how they're behaving in relationship to any market, you can find what their need is and fill it. This shows that there is a huge need for light leather, medium leather, Mithril, Thorium and about a half dozen other things. It is obvious that there is no one on the server farming mats between the levels of 15-50, but many guys supplying Northrend stuff. Low supply and steady demand means big profits if you can fill the gaps.
Still we didn't farm but we told a few people we would pay them twice the market rate for every stack they could get their hands on. Now the Auction House has just enough mats at a price we set that we make far more out of the low end mats. And since we control the supply, we set the price. Every now and again some nut posts a few stacks at doofy prices and we buy him out and pop them right back up at the proper price. The proper price is always the price where the supply curve meets the demand curve and establishes equilibrium.
Item level has of course nothing to do with it. For instance, if there are 400 stacks of Titanium and a demand for 200, the price is at least two times too high. If there are 2 stacks of Liferoot and demand for 20 stacks, the price is 10 times too low. It does make no difference if the price for Earthroot eventually passes that of the price for the Titanium. Supply above demand lowers prices, demand above supply raises them.
So you should look for these types of things in your market and make sure you are looking in the right spots. If you must farm, you better look for the things most people skip and pretty soon you will be raking it in with both hands and just laughing when everyone else is taking a beating on those high volatile high end mats while you vacation in Stranglethorn off your earnings from the lowbie stuff.
