Partnership with another banker

This is my post for the JMTC blogging carnival for June " What is your most devious gold making strategy"


This is actually a hard post as I am not a very devious person, but this I guess falls into a somewhat devious plan.
It started a few months ago when I noticed another gold making banker(who this blog is named after) on my server and started chatting with him a bit, we threw some ideas around and formed an in game friendship. We both wanted to explore new markets and mainly wanted to get into Arbitrage. I wont go into much detail here because there is a ton of info already blogged about for cross faction trading. Faid has put up excellent post about this topic.It is titled Arbitrage: What is it and why aren't I doing it?

We both had a few bank alts or slots open for new bank toons.So we start by moving 50 of each pet and recipe cross faction through the neutral AH and put a bank toon in each others bank, and use one bank for the pets and one for recipes.

We each have two toons to sell these recipes and pets on plus our main bank alts, so a total of 3 bank toons each not counting the toon we each use on the other faction. Now what this does is create false competition making it look like 6 toons are already in these markets, we also have different play times for the most part although some times are overlapping, but we each have our eyes on the market when the other is not on, and finally if one of us needs a break from listing or isn't going to be around the other can take over the duties.Another tip is that we list at different Auction lengths and different price points.

 
It started with just vendor pets and recipes but we have moved into other markets such as Lamps, Lanterns, Epics, and Darkmoon decks.

I would recommend a RL friend for this, but we have been doing this for about two months and have had no problems. We both had to put out a level of trust in the other and we could have lost a bit of gold if the other was dishonest, but I think it was worth the initial gold invested to see if it could work and it has.

I'm sure that this could work in other markets, but as we didn't have a second account this made more sense then getting into a market that we could just do by ourselves.