It's a shame; around the middle of the month it seemed like things were improving; although I think we can all agree that the markets were due for a correction. I had risen above my target of 6.5% monthly savings growth; but due to end-of-month market downturn, that number got reduced to 4.11%. There's still a few days left in the month, so I could see that rise up back to my target, if I'm lucky.
Although my investments underperformed (although, you could say that a 4.11% rise in the middle of a downturn is still amazingly good), my overall side project/passive income beat last month, making this the third month in a row I've managed to see an increase month-over-month.
Here's my side income numbers for the month:
No surprise here, my Flipping endeavor continues to be my highest performer (reselling items at a profit).
Here's the full breakdown:
- $512 from flipping from all my sales channels (Ebay, Bonanza, Facebook Marketplace, Kijiji, and Craigslist). For the first time, I had a few sales (not just one!) on Bonanza, which should open up new opportunities there now that I have a history of shipping. Items were all over the board in diversity as always, but like I mentioned in previous posts, I tend to gravitate towards electronics
- $230 from cryptocurrency mining on my rigs. Still unstable from previous mining software updates; although for the past week, I've managed to make them much more stable. I'm due for another round of updates on all my rigs soon, which should hopefully fix the previous instability issues for good
- $70 from 3D Print sales on Ebay. Another poor performing month for 3D Print sales, but I am starting to heavily promote my Shopify store on my youtube channel with a 20% off discount, seeing more traffic
- +$34.02 from algo trading on Bittrex, but -$16.55 from algo trading on Binance. My homemade trading bot.
- The rest is small potatoes from the other projects:
- $0.03 from Amazon Affiliates (lol)
- -$0.64 from Burstcoin mining (value of coins dropped more than I mined)
- $4.48 from Shapeways sales
- $8.58 from MyMiniFactory sales
- $2.34 from stock dividends
With my homebrew trading bot, which is trading cryptocurrency on Binance and Bittrex, I made some changes so the bot will keep up to three month's worth of testing history, instead of one month; I made that change a few days ago so it will be a while before it can backfill it's testing data with that much data (as it's collected live). This should theoretically lead my bot to being less sensitive to pump-and-dump schemes for automatically determining what the most profitable strategy & trading pair combination is; unfortunately also making it less responsive to overall market changes. I'm hoping the benefits outweigh the cons in this regard.
As you can see, I've seen some success with the Bittrex instance of my bot this month; while a bit of a continued downturn with the binance bot. I continue to iterate to try and make them profitable.
I also recently got news that Bittrex is phasing out their v1 API, which is what my bot uses; so I have a work item in my queue to update it to v3 of their API, further adding to my work load (more on that towards the end of the post...)
As I don't believe I've ever showed a screenshot of what my bots look like in action; I wrote them in C# using Windows Forms. Here's them right now as of writing this post:
This is where being a programmer by trade comes in handy.
On the topic of Affiliate Marketing, I have some good news! After many iterations of jumping through hoops during several application attempts, I was finally approved for Amazon Affiliates Canada! Still awaiting enough sales on the US platform to qualify.
I also have good news on the Youtube front! As of yesterday, I have reached the required Watch Time threshhold for monetization! My subscriber count is still lacking though--only at 870 out of 1,000 as of writing. That's up from 757 subscribers from last month's post; which is a 14.9% increase--a higher rate than last month's 11.7% increase!
Based on this 14.9% increase, if I'm super lucky, I will hit the required 1,000 subs for monetization by the next blog post! I'm very excited about this, as Mike in the Woods (my Youtube channel) is something I've put a lot of time and effort into, and is something I plan on growing into some pretty cool and interesting stuff in the future.
If you are not familiar with my Youtube channel, here it is (I combine fun, futuristic technology with traditional outdoors experiences)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbJKQGEOXhez4HS_LEvFXPg
On the topic of automated trading; I've been passive in my stock trading endeavors. Just been sticking to index funds and dividend stocks at this point--not really making use of my paid alphavantage API key; so I had it downgraded back to the free version for now. The only things I day trade are cryptos; so if I start day trading stocks again, I can just go and re-upgrade my API key at any point. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
With my Binance referrals, I'm starting to get a stable (but paltry) flow of revenue from referral fees. At the moment I think I've earned a whopping total of 14 cents! I'm at 43 referrals, up from last month's 31; which is a +12 gain--or 38.7% growth.
With my social media bot--yet another homebrew C# creation--I doubled the post frequency; it now posts once every four hours: A youtube video, a shopify product, and a shapeways product, in cyclical fashion; rotating through a CSV document of posts with each post; to help drive a bit of traffic to each of those endeavors. Currently my bot only posts to imgur and twitter; I've been thinking about looking into how to implement a Facebook API as well.
As for my work queue, I'm starting to fall a bit behind; I'm getting more items on the to-do list than I'm actually managing to knock off; which is why prioritization by importance and chronology is so important!
Let's take a look at everything I mentioned last blog post, that I wanted to accomplish over this past month, and where I got with it:
- If approved, implement Jeven Dovey affiliate marketing program with Twitter bot
I applied, but never heard back. I assume I was not approved (probably already at capacity). Oh well, it was worth a shot - Mirror my Youtube Channel to both Lbry and BitChute alternative platforms
Synced with Lbry, decided to see how Lbry plays out before moving on to BitChute - Ongoing listings of things for sale for my Flipping project
Falling behind on listings. I have almost 30 listings I need to put up. Biggest bottleneck is sourcing enough items to put up for sale! - Implement End Screens for my Youtube channel to keep viewers in my channel ecosystem
Done. Also starting to implement cards and pinned comments. - Investigate potential rewards and added value for viewers with a Patreon
Investigation complete. A full six-tier Patreon reward system has been devised--I will share it next month when I've had a chance to implement it - At least three new Youtube videosAs of writing this post, I have four videos uploaded this month. If I manage to complete and upload my latest video over the next two days, I will bump that number up to five
- Ongoing listings of things for sale for my Flipping Project
- Four new Youtube videos (two of which will be trip videos)
- Stabilize mining rigs so they don't require constant rebooting
- Migrate automated trading bot to v3 of the Bittrex API, from v1
- 4x MyMiniFactory listings
- 2x Shapeways listings
- Implement cards and pinned comments in all Youtube videos to increase retention in my channel ecosystem
- Implement Patreon--targeting all six tiers, but first three will suffice for initial implementation
And, lastly, we always take a look from my actual investment numbers to see how they did:
Stocks had a bit of a decline in value from last month. Earned a few dollars in dividend payments (this is an off-month for my dividends, I think it was only my ZSP.TO that came in this month, which pays monthly). Coinsquare investment is up, mostly through mining deposits. Bittrex is up significantly due to a breakout success in trading, while Binace saw a bit of a decline due to a minor loss in trading (most value loss comes from a drop in crypto value). As mentioned at the start of the blog post, I'm only sitting at 4.11% growth month-over-month from last month. I'll wait until the end of the month to see if I rise back up to 6.5%; I may deposit $130 in cash to my stock account to sort of 'cheat' my way to the 6.5% mark if needed.
With manual cryptocurrency trading, as mentioned on a previous post, I use signals from my trading bot to make manual trades on Coinsquare. With my baseline constantly updated to account for incoming deposits, I am up by 6.24% from my baseline BTC value from trading right now. At one point I was up by 15%, but an issue getting trades to fill has left me a bit behind. In fact, that seems to be a major concern on Coinsquare--getting orders to fill in a timely fashion. It's not unusual for an order to take several days to fill, and that's only on the $2,000 scale. Unfortunate. However, I'm still seeing growth, so that's good. Currently waiting on several altcoin Sell orders to fill.
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If you find these posts helpful, and you are interested in cryptocurrency, try signing up for Binance! It's a widely-known cyrptocurrency exchange (think stock exchange, but for crypto). It's free to do so, and by using my referral link we'll both earn 10% of any trading fees you pay.
https://www.binance.com/en/register?ref=WZKZ16ZW
See you next post!
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