It's Saturday - where did the week go ? The weather is nicely spring-like at last, I really should do some gardening.....
Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio
Here's my table of progress for the week;
How Did The Week Go ?
I have to be honest and say it was a relatively low-effort week last week. Real life continues to keep me thoroughly busy - if anything, it's getting to the point where I'm starting to get over-committed and need to get a few projects finished that have been dragging.
But despite that, I managed to keep up with posting and curation. I'm significantly short on HP earnings compared to the goal, but with any luck I'll be able to address that over the course of the year. If the worst comes to the worst, with HBD earnings nicely above target so far there may come a time when I take author rewards as 100% HP for a bit.
Apart from HP, every other goal is nicely on track. It's still early in the year, but things are progressing well. If a couple of the targets get hit early, it'll free up resources I can switch across to increasing HP earnings.
A Bit Of Light Trading
Something else I've dipped my toes into is a bit of trading on Hivedex between HIVE and HBD.
Hivedex has the advantage that it's basically fee-free (although I think they might make a little on slippage, which I'm fine with).
I created a secondary Hive account in order to keep things separate, making administration a lot simpler. I invested 87.551 HIVE, at a GBP cost of £28.48. 10 of the HIVE were powered up so that the account would have resource credits. I also delegated 100HP to it. Might as well use the account to do a bit of curating as well !
The overall goal is to see how much I can increase the overall value of the account, and see if this is a greater gain than my usual one of curation, author rewards and HBD interest.
The metric I'm using is the overall HIVE value of the account. USD and GBP values are both bouncing around all over the place (who said crypto was the only volatile asset !), so although I'm recording the gains or losses in GBP, it's secondary to the HIVE value. After all, if I cash out, to a certain extent I can choose when based on the price of HIVE at the time.
I set up three trade "cycles", with each one switching back and forth between HBD and HIVE and aiming to grow the total of each incrementally above it's previous value each time.
One cycle went wrong; I don't think it was anything I did, I just took advantage of a brief spike in price and then couldn't get it back in range to carry on trading. Lesson learned - the method I'm using seems to work best when there's volatility but it's up and down rather than a big spike in one direction. Having initially used 27.551 HIVE to buy 10.9612 HBD and traded it up to 13.899 HBD, once I saw I couldn't easily take it any further I stuck it into savings to get the HBD interest.
The second cycle started with 13.5HBD, which I've traded up to 13.857 HBD but is now a little stuck because I need HIVE to hit 0.50 HBD/HIVE to trigger the next trade.
The third cycle has been the most successful, starting with 14.56 HBD, traded up over several iterations to 18.027 HBD, and just waiting for HIVE to dip slightly to 0.429 HBD/HIVE to turn it into 42.021 HIVE (compared to 30.27 HIVE that it was at in the first iteration).
Overall, since 1st January I've turned 87.551 HIVE into 37.74 HIVE and 31.926 HBD, equivalent to 110.1 HIVE, or a growth of 25.7%. For a rank amateur, I'm kind of pleased I could do that, and it was fun to do !
If you're not familiar with SaturdaySavers, it's a fabulous initiative run by @shanibeer writing as @sally-saver on the @eddie-earner account, where we all support each other in getting to our savings goals.
If you are one of my friends reading this (or just someone who tripped over one of my posts), I really recommend this as a great community that's well worth joining.
I'm normally very disorganised about saving, and the support of the wonderful people in #SaturdaySavers has been invaluable in keeping me focused. I can honestly say that without it, my HP would probably be half what it is now.
So join ! You don't have to wait until the start of the year. The best time to start saving is ten years ago. The second best time is right now !
