Yesterday while the Easter bunnies did whatever they supposed to do, I took some time to check up on our internal 'Market' feature in our wallet. Being around for many years, I never really had a look at this market.

Most of you probably know this internal market we have, but for those who don't: The internal market is in your wallet. You can access it through one of the pulldown menu's in your Steem and Steem Dollar balances. You can also access the market directly with this link: https://steemitwallet.com/market.

Although Steem Dollar suggests a kinda stable value closely linked with fiat currencies - at least that is what I always thought what these currencies are about - the reality is these currencies go up and down, on macro level mostly kinda in sync with Steem. But that said, aren't - on macro level - most of the crypto currencies going up and down in kinda sync mode?

^{published by MAD Tourbooking (source)}

Playing around with the internal markets at both Steem and HIVE, I started to like the simplicity of this market tool. Its very basic: Yes! But it does its job when you would like try and earn a bit of extra money by converting Steem into Steem Dollar and Steem Dollar into Steem. The exchange rates swing; Swings that can give us some extra Steem to - eventually - powerup.

Spreads?

Yesterday in the HIVE market I made several trades back and fort between HIVE and HIVE Dollars. The spread between sell and buy prices was close to 10% which drew my interest. After checking historical orders and watching the screens for at least an hour, I discovered some user selling 600 HIVE approximately every 10 minutes by grabbing the open orders, and some - or more - users buying HIVE whenever someone put an order to sell a larger amount (a few hundred to more HIVE) by grabbing the open orders as well.

Game On!

The intention was to grab HIVE and sell it immediately after and taking between 5% to 10% profit every cycle. Although I had a great time the four to five hours I was playing this game, I didn't had a lot of luck. It all seemed so simple. But then, some others discovered the spread trading as well and had to compete with them. At some point the spread became so thin, it was not worth the effort anymore.

Talking about Effort

The game of this spread trading seemed so simple, but due to competition many of the attempts didn't turn out to be successful. Sure, I got some successful cycles done, but in the end with just a handful of coins in the trades, the net effect may not be more than a few Euro's worth of coins. When being able to automate the spread trading, it may be something interesting. Am not at all a trader, and don't know all the tricks, but am pretty sure all sort of software is available and a bunch of users are specialist in spread trading. I'm not one of them.

Other Ways?

I may setup a bunch of buy and sell order to see if this brings something. I was reading about this from @davidke20, his - assuming it's a guy - posts about crypto trading are very interesting. This one for instance:

https://steemit.com/hive-175254/@davidke20/steem-talk-understanding-crypto-trading-episode-5

Though I love the game of trading, again I realised I'm not a daytrader. Like a few years ago when I did some trading, acting like a daytrader, spending more than 8 hours a day with my trading screens, I got fed up with the activity of trading after a week or so. I tried a bit of trading by setting buy and sell orders, but I never really looked into strategies that actually works. Yesterday's spread trading, gave me a new impulse again. When I can find some time coming weeks, I'll be reading up on trading in general and trading tips and tricks more specifically. Am pretty sure we have some great traders in our community, so I hope to learn from you.

Do Easter Bunnies Trade?

a STEEM original
_{all screenshots by edje}

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^{steem curator for @illuminati-inc @qsounds}