// A cool thing you can do on the Steem internal market

Now that the posts started paying out SBD instead of just Steem (in one form or the other) i decided to take a look at the Steemit internal STEEM/SBD market. Since all my bot investment (and yes i use a lot of bots) was initially in STEEM, to keep myself from taking any kind of loss, after payout i always sell the SBD for STEEM. Since bots are a pretty safe investment (and when i say bots, i mean "Upvote services" rather then bidbots which i do not use since they are a complete waste of money in terms of ROI) i always come on top at least 10% to what i invested.

But i noticed one thing during my use of the internal market. Since SBD is pretty stable and the STEEM/SBD price never fluctuates greatly in short burst of time, and here we are talking seconds, tied into 0 fees and almost instant transactions, you have an opportunity to do extremely short term trades.
What you basically do is buy STEEM by making an order that will top the "buy order" list by just a factor of a 0.001, if someone offers more, then you cancel and do the same thing again. Once your order is complete, and it will be complete in just a few seconds, you create a sell order, top that again with a slightly lower offer by a value of 0.001 and repeat.
I have noticed one guy that has programmed a bot to do this for him and i can see he is doing really well.

I tried this for maybe 30 minutes as a test. Did aprox 30ish trades on a starting "investment" of 12.439 SBD which in the end got me a 1.34% ROI. I know this isnt much, but if you can replicate the same thing with bots and have a 1.5% ROI per hour, thats a massive amount....

Now, while the market is relatively stable and the internal market being slightly isolated and low volume, you are mostly safe when doing these "few second" trades. Trading inside the spread.
The biggest danger here being if someone drops a large amount of STEEM/SBD on the market and fills a huge number of the orders pending and you find yourself on the wrong side of the trade.

But even then, you have a 50% chance to be on the right side. :D
Those things extremely rarely happen, id even say never, and when there is a pump it mostly takes more then 1 trade so you have time to adjust since you are doing few second trades.
In a stable market i think you can maintain a 1% ROI per hour, so even if theres a instant 30% jump you just basically only lost a day of work.

This is basically speculation on the atomic level and STEEM having 0 fees for transfers makes it happen.
Of course you would want to choke yourself to death trying to do this for a whole day, but if you programmed a bot to do it for you im pretty sure this could be a fool proof way for profit in the long run.

The biggest problem though is that due to low volume its questionable how higher up from 10 SBD you could go to trade with. But say you managed to get a 100 SBD to work for you with 1% profit per hour, you would double those 100 SBD in less then 5 days.

Im not saying you should try this, but its doable imo. There are probably a few more variables to think about and i just basically glanced over it, but this is something people do on exchanges and its many times more risky to do it there, due to fees and a much faster reaction time to price fluctuations on the overall market.

Not financial advice. :D

Ill see you around.