Insider Trader is a column about professions, written by Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, who also writes Gold Capped. If you're looking for general auction house advice, you'll find it in Gold Capped; Insider Trader focuses on specific profitable markets.

Got this from Thoorull on Steamwheedle Cartel (EU-H):
Blizzard has a long tradition of taking some "special" mats or crafts off of cooldown eventually, to help players along as content progresses. There are many cases: The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King cloth, Transmute: Titanium, Smelt: Titansteel, etc. What I completely fail to understand is why some now-trivial transmutes are still on a cooldown. Not just plain cooldown, but the all-important one which is used also for current epic gems. This includes vanilla iron, truesilver and essences, and TBC primals in addition to the said current-content epic gems and eternals. It completely baffles me why I can transmute a bajillion of titanium bars or current-content meta gems (as long as I have the mats) but not some old and obscure stuff. This is an excellent observation that's been bugging me for a while. Cataclysm is just around the corner, and everyone will be leveling new characters and doing trade skills from the ground up. It sure would be awesome to have the ability to turn readily available mithril and iron into much harder-to-find truesilver and gold. Let's look into what trade skill cooldowns really do.

Cooldowns are a limiting factor of supply. Economically, some items can't be available with virtually infinite supply, or else the items they can be made into would become cheap, and therefore less valuable, in the eye of the average player. Part of what Blizzard does (extremely well, in my opinion) is balance what players want with what they think they want.

You can't always get what you want ...

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