Long Term Investment: Pets

Almost any item that will have a demand in Cataclysm can net you amazing profit if you stockpile it now. Pets are a great example, namely the pets from the Oracles' Cracked Egg Sholazar Basin. This Egg requires you to be revered with the Oracles, and requires you to wait three days until it hatches into something.

 

The only people who will be in Northrend in Cataclysm are ambitious players or levelers. Without the portals it will actually take effort to go to Northrend and back. The average player will not go to this effort to obtain the pets rewarded from this Egg and would much rather head to the Auction House to find their favorite pets there.

The pets that you should be stockpiling now are:
Cobra Hatchling
Tickbird Hatchling
White Tickbird Hatchling
Proto-Drake Whelp


 The first three hatchlings listed all have a 20% drop rate, but the Proto-Drake Whelp has a much lower drop-rate. It will sell for far more than the others because the demand is the same but the supply will be far less than that of the other pets.

You should be thinking about selling these pets slowly any time after the release of Cataclysm, and there's really no reason you shouldn't be doing this on your main character! Hope this tip helps you!


::Xalted

Cataclysm Cooking 1: Cooking Dailies

 Patch 4.0.3a brings us the new Cooking and Fishing dailies in Orgrimmar (and Stormwind), which can be extremely profitable right now and into the early months of Cataclysm.


The quests given by Malrogg in Orgrimmar are as follows:
Careful, This Fruit Bites Back
Even Thieves Get Hungry
Everything Is Better With Bacon
Stealing From Our Own

Each of these quests awards +1 to the Cooking skill and 1 Chef's Award, which is the new Cooking currency.

One of the things you can buy from the Sous Chef recipe vendor in Orgrimmar now is a 'Crate of Tasty Meat'. It costs 2 Chef's Awards, and rewards several Cataclysm level meats. At the moment these meats are selling for at least 50-100g a piece, and they sell extremely well. The demand for these items will only increase as we get closer to Cataclysm, and will continue to rise for the first year or so of the expansion.

My tip is that on your main character, stock up the Chef's Awards to buy the hot recipes that sell nicely, and on all your alt characters, turn your Chef's Awards into Crates of Meat for massive profits.

::Xalted