MarketWatch: The Complete Guide

I built MarketWatch because I got tired of scrolling back through Trade chat trying to find the one WTS post I'd half-noticed a minute ago. On a populated realm, Trade moves fast enough that anything worth seeing is buried under a dozen unrelated posts within a minute, and manually re-reading chat history to find it again is a genuine waste of time. This is the deeper version of what's on the addons page — how I actually use it day to day, not just the feature list.

1.What it actually watches

MarketWatch reads every WTS, WTB and WTT post across Trade, General, Yell and Say and sorts it automatically into categories — mats, BoEs, mounts, transmog, boosts, character trades. The point isn't just organizing the noise, it's that you can leave it running and glance at it instead of actively reading chat, which is the whole reason I built it this way.

2.How I actually use it

I run it passively in the background while doing dailies, farming or just questing, and check the categorized list every so often rather than watching chat scroll in real time. Deal alerts — when something's priced noticeably under market, flagged right in the tooltip — are the thing I actually pay attention to, since that's the one category worth interrupting what I'm doing for. Everything else I browse when I actually need to buy or sell something specific, using the category tabs instead of scrolling.

3.Commands

• /mw or /marketwatch — open / close the main window
• /mw config — open settings
• /mw transmog — open the transmog listings panel directly
• /mw trade — open the character trade listings panel directly

All window positions, scale and settings save per-character and restore automatically on your next login, so setting it up once per character is genuinely a one-time cost, not something you redo every session.

4.The Auctionator dependency, properly explained

Deal alerts only work as well as the pricing data behind them, which is why a tested Auctionator build ships in the same download rather than leaving you to find your own. If you already had Auctionator installed before adding MarketWatch, delete that folder and use the bundled one instead. Running a different or older version alongside MarketWatch is the single most common cause of alerts breaking or showing prices that don't match what's actually on the auction house — if your deal alerts suddenly look wrong, this is the first thing to check.

5.Getting the most out of filters

Blacklist and keyword filters exist because trade chat has repeat offenders — the same boost seller spamming every two minutes, or a term you just don't care about ever seeing. Filtering those out aggressively makes the categorized view actually useful instead of just as noisy as raw chat was, so don't be shy about blacklisting early rather than tolerating clutter for weeks before bothering to filter it.

6.Saved listings, actually used

The saved-listings feature is the one people skip past and then wish they'd used. If you see a mount, a transmog piece or a mats bundle that's interesting but you're not ready to buy right that second, save it instead of trusting you'll remember the seller's name or the price later. I use this constantly for transmog specifically — browsing that category once a day and saving anything worth a second look, then actually acting on the saved list when I have gold free, rather than trying to recall a listing from three days ago.

7.Troubleshooting

If deal alerts stop appearing entirely, check Auctionator is actually scanning — MarketWatch can only flag under-market prices if it has recent pricing data to compare against, and a stale or broken Auctionator scan means every listing looks unremarkable even when it isn't. If categories seem to be sorting posts incorrectly, that's usually a keyword edge case (a WTS post phrased unusually) rather than a real bug — the blacklist and keyword tools let you manually correct for the specific sellers or phrasings that trip up the automatic sorting on your server.