If you farm your own mats I could see this, as its pure profit technically. Although if you are buying mats and you are undercutting below your profit margin (or what the profit magin is for someone who bought mats) your causing problems.

@nangzz - If you farm your own mats you aren't getting pure profit. You are losing out on the profit you would have made if you sold the mats instead of turning them into glyphs.

Farmed mats have a cost of your time. Time = Money/Gold.

One of the most complex subjects to master (I think) is the idea that time is money. Its the economic equivalent to E=MC^2. If you are doing all these wasteful things in the hope of owning the market, good luck to you, but your time/money is much lower than it could be. Unless you are a person who literally does not value their time.

The whole point of glyphing to me is that it's a complex market, yet mostly automatable, and I have never failed to make a very nice time/money profit. I typically end up making 500-1000g per hour invested. This is over the course of say a week. It would typically take me a few hours to mill and make glyphs, and another hour in total to check mail, repost. This leads to a very easy source of profit generation.

Transmutes of any sort are also effective in terms of time/money. Dailies are also surprisingly profitable and consistant, as are herb gathering (at one point during a high point I made more money selling herbs than I did making glyphs, in terms of time/money).

It depends on your likes, the market, and your professions, but pretty much anyone can earn 250g per hour doing dailies, and the numbers just go up from there. One fun thing on the economy side is to try and find the most efficient way to make gold. Glyphs are pretty high up there, but I am sure there are even more efficient things out there.