The Diablo 3 Ruby Pump'n'Dump - How I lost 10 million gold in 2 hours

Diablo 3 is a game full of economic opportunity. There are always money to be made if you know what you're doing.
There's also a crap ton of money to be lost if you don't and you try to get in on a wild wave of commodity pricing speculation.


Incidentally, it is the latter of the two options that I amused myself with yesterday evening after having read the Blizzard post about the Paragon system that we'll get in the upcoming patch...

Free Gold just waiting for me to pick up?! Throw in some magic beans and you have a deal, good sir!

Basically the Paragon system is going to be a way of alternate leveling that will increase your base stats and, more importantly, boost your gold and magic find to an eventual point where magic find and gold find on gear because completely irrelevant.

The Paragon levels will be gained through normal XP and this is the critical part.

If you've been rummaging around the gem market you may have noticed that rubies are quite cheap compared to the other gems. This is because the effect of putting a ruby in your helmet is that you gain more XP, which has obviously been quite useless for a level 60 character up until now, hence driving the value of rubies down.
Suddenly people are going to care about gems that give them XP again, even the level 60 crowd with their big fat wallets. This is going to increase demand significantly and should therefore mean a nice price hike on rubies.

By the time I saw the post and put 2 and 2 together (Shit! I need to buy rubies and gets da golds!) the post had been up for two hours.

Unfortunately two hours on the Diablo 3 auction house is a very long time indeed.
When I got onto the AH the price of rubies were already up to anywhere between two to TEN times of the average price of yesterdays trading.

Now, this is where a smart person should realize that there is a massive price bubble forming and step back for a second and think about if this sort of price development is really sustainable.

Don't worry, the loud "wooshing" sound you're hearing is just my gold going down the drain

Since that is way to boring I instead decided that what I needed to do was dump huge amounts of gold into rubies and cash in on these skyrocketing prices!

Two hours and 30 million gold later it started to dawn on me that I had purchased rubies at the *absolute peak* of their price. Prices were already coming down and I was now stuck with a full stash of extremely risky assets that I felt a strong need to get rid of before all my wealth slipped through my fingers in red crystallized droplets of remorse.

I got out with about a 10 million gold loss but a very valuable lesson learnt; when the market is already moving you better think think twice before getting on the speeding train.




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