Since tax season is over and I actually have time to breathe, sleep, and write, I thought I would take a moment and examine how my MinnowBooster investment is doing.
Long time followers know that I'm a financial guy, and steemit forms a significant part of my crypto portfolio as one of the few projects that actually generates cash flow - the most important phrase in business. You can see my excellent artwork representing my portfolio here: @nealmcspadden/how-a-financial-guy-invests-in-crypto
MinnowBooster is a huge part of that cash flow. There are other bots and upvoting pools, but MinnowBooster is the best that I have found so far.
I use four of MinnowBooster's functions:
- leasing my STEEM power to the leasing market - returns STEEM for my STEEM Power
- selling my vote - returns SBD for my STEEM Power
- using the voting pool on my own content - returns SBD and STEEM Power for my SBD
- using my SBD dust to upvote comments automatically
So I decided to put together a little profit & loss statement for the month of April, which you can see in the image above.
First, since I still have the USD as my monetary base,I needed to come up with a price for mark-to-market. Mark-to-market is an important accounting principle that compares investments to the current prices rather than whatever you paid for things originally (mark-to-book). Mark-to-book often gives us a false perspective because it ignores the current reality of the market we are dealing with. Just because I paid some price in the past doesn't mean I can get that back if the market has changed.
And in crypto, change is the only constant.
So for purposes of this analysis, I chose the end of the month, April 30. Then I got the open, high, low, and close prices of STEEM and SBD from coinmarketcap. The OHLC average is a reasonably effective way to calculate the average price of the day. A better way would be a volume weighted price, but coinmarketcap doesn't have that kind of functionality. So the average price for STEEM was 4.085 USD and for SBD was 3.3825 USD. Those numbers allow me to calculate how my investment is doing within the STEEM ecosystem.
Next, I calculated my revenues.
This turned out to be more complicated than I thought at first. The first two MinnowBooster functions were easy enough. Currently I am leasing 816 STEEM Power to the delegation marketplace and making 0.644 STEEM per day. That worked out to 19.32 STEEM income for the month.
The vote selling was also very easy to tabulate since MinnowBooster provides last month's information on its website. So I made 3.039112 SBD there.
The other two functions, spending SBD for post upvotes and spending SBD to upvote posts proved to be too much for me to tabulate. Theoretically I could go through all the logs for the month and try to calculate the author vs curator rewards, but that's way too much for a relatively minor part of the returns.
So the calculated ROI is actually under-estimating the return because of these unaccounted for revenues.
I'll do a better job for May keeping track of these other functions.
Another complication comes in when producing your own content. If you upvote your content to raise its visibility, how much of those subsequent rewards are a result of that original upvote? You could do some comparisons between your upvoted posts and your non-upvoted posts to get an idea, but each piece of content is unique so it won't be an exact comparison.
Even so, the ROI comes out to 2.22% on my invested STEEM Power for the month of April or 26.68% annually. And that's pretty damned good.
Of course, crypto in general has been in an uptrend lately, so the overall USD value has been increasing as well. A nice bonus. And just as a pat on my back, I totally called the bottom on April 3: @nealmcspadden/crypto-capitulation
If you were thinking about dipping your toes in the MinnowBooster water and this helped you make a decision, use my affiliate link to sign up here: https://www.minnowbooster.com/vote-selling/?ref=499467
References
https://www.minnowbooster.com/vote-selling/?ref=499467
@nealmcspadden/how-a-financial-guy-invests-in-crypto
@nealmcspadden/crypto-capitulation
https://coinmarketcap.com/