Could There Be a Long Term Arbitrage Opportunity With SteemDollars?
I was obviously really freaking excited when I saw that my introductory post had made $161.25 in up-votes. It was encouraging and I have already started to write the novel that I am going to be publishing on SteemIt. If you don't know what I mean by that, check out the introductory post; it'll have all the details there.
But now here I was sitting on money. Hot damn ... I had $80.808 in Steem Dollars, which are worth about $1.00 in Steem and then another 26.631 Steem Power. I was pumped and started to do some research on what I could do with the Steem Dollars (since I know that I can't withdraw the SP).
And then I noticed something interesting ...
Let's say I wanted to transfer to Bittrex (and their wallets were working). If I were to then sell the Steem Dollars for Bitcoin, what would originally have been $1.00 of Bitcoin for every Steem Dollar, I was actually only going to get $0.85 of Bitcoin for every Steem Dollar. In other words, I'd be losing 15% of every Steem Dollar that I sold. Obviously I didn't want that to happen.
So I was in a bit of a situation. Do I keep my Steem Dollars? Do I sell them at a discount? Do I power up? I didn't know what to do.
But then I noticed something interesting about Steem Dollars. Their value has been dropping regularly consistently since they first started trading.
Look at the image below ...
Since the end of July 25th, the price of a Steem Dollar has been cheaper than $1.00. We're talking about close to 3 days. Obviously the price was greater before then, but it has been trending down, slowly, as more people sell their Steem Dollars.
And if we look at the available volume referenced above in the Bittrex image, there is only 14 BTC in volume for Steem Dollars. So that got me thinking ...
If a Steem Dollar is worth $1 of Steem and it's only selling on the exchange for $0.85, what if I were to take the Steem Dollars and convert them into Steem, thus giving myself a 15% boost to my earnings?
So I did a little more investigating and saw that the conversion was painful except for one part ...
It takes 7 days to convert from Steem Dollars to Steem, which I imagine is by design. Okay, so I stop and rethink the plan. If I don't do the conversion, I have to hope that the demand for Steem Dollars increases to the point that it reaches parity before I actually get my ~$80 in reward for the article I wrote.
Or ...
I take a risk. If the trend continues for Steem Dollars and they continue to drop or just stay at some sort of a 10-15% discount, I could effectively increase my reward for that article by 10-15%.
And since there is a lot more volume to buy Steem rather than Steem Dollars, it would be much easier to liquidate that reward. That would allow me to make an additional $8 - $12 for that article, pushing me much closer to $100 in instant reward.
The primary risk here is the seven days. But is the economy of the Steem Dollar going to improve by 15% with so much more supply made available? And with there only being 14 BTC buying demand presently, could the price actually go lower?
I'm going to investigate. I have initiated a conversion of my Steem Dollars into Steem. I have converted my ~$80 Steem Dollars into Steem. In seven days, we'll have an answer. And if I am wrong, I won't lose too much money.
Thanks for reading! For those that are waiting for the first chapter of my story, I promise it's coming!
Is there an advantage to waiting the 7 days, do you know about the insite market?
https://steemit.com/market
According to the white paper there are mechanisms to, over the course of a week to always return SBD to parity with the dollar, if that's the case (there is probably market effects on exchanges to stop it) SBD is a good buy
I am pretty sure that these mechanisms are the interest that those that hold SD earn, though I think @dan or @ned would know better about that. At 10%, that interest might not be enough to get people to buy SD right now, especially with the amount of selling pressure that there is on the exchanges. Do I get 10% or do I get instant, ya know?
the 10% is variable right? set at different rates to bring sbd to parity
As far as I know, witnesses can increase the interest to try and bring it to parity.
let me know how it goes
Will do!
I wrote an article that explains the math involved in a simple way to arbitrage across cryptocurrency exchanges. Important to know what you are getting into so that you will not be trading at a loss. https://steemit.com/arbitrage/@kesor/the-math-behind-cross-exchange-arbitrage-trading
Nice post!