At time of writing, Covid cases seem to be on the rise again; the fabled 'fourth wave.' Thankfully, this time around, I think it's a little less concerning as here in Ontario we're highly vaccinated and seeing a much slower rate of serious type cases.
Crypto saw a huge recovery this past month, leading to a huge resurgence in my investment portfolio. I'm up 36.26% in my investments, and made $1,921 gross revenue this month from my various projects!
I have a fair amount to talk about this month, so let's begin.
As always, let's break down my revenue sources:
- $1,042 from Nicehash, marking one of only two months this year that my Nicehash revenue has broken the $1k mark. Primarily due to me stabilizing all my mining rigs and returning Mining Rig 4 to active service
- $534 on Poloniex; caused by a massive pump in the asset I hold on there (BTT) for staking rewards
- $117 from Youtube ad revenue
- $110 from flipping
- $72 from Print on Demand sales, including my first sales on both Teepublic AND Zazzle!
- $34 from Amazon Associates referral sales
- $23 in Signum (formerly Burst) credit value gain (since last I tracked it)
- $11.62 in 3d print sales on Shapeways
- $10.20 in 3d print model sales on MyMiniFactory
- $10 in 3D print sales (one single sale haha)
- $7.35 in stock dividends
- $1.13 in LBRY credits
- -$53.95 from Bittrex algo trading
Oh, homebrew trading bot, what am I going to do with you...
It's come to my attention that how my bot places orders (places it on the Last price and sits until the order fills or times out) is generally a 'toxic order fill', where the order gets filled by other people's orders walking up or down the bid/ask spread, generally resulting in the asset price being below my buy price or higher than my sell price on order fills.
I don't believe that is a huge issue yet--at least at my scale of trading. I've lengthened my sell order timeout to an entire week, which seems to work really well in practice so far. The losses haven't been from order timeouts this time around, which is a step in the right direction--the trade losses are from just poor trades (selling lower than the buy). Given that my bot operates on three month's worth of trading history for strategy selection, I think this may be a bit of a transition period from the market changing overall direction from bear to bull recently. Something I'll have to think about.
On the Coinsquare front, as mentioned last month, their public API for price fetching doesn't work any more; and I got an update from them saying it was due to security risks, and they had an updated version in the works. In the mean time, I've created Tipsters for what assets I could to track Bittrex instead; using the price data and buy/sell strategy recommendations from that to make the manual trades on Coinsquare.
The fiat value of my holdings has gone up thanks to the market recovery, as has my BTC value. I am currently up 115% over my base value BTC holdings thanks to making manual trades.
With Poloniex, I've decided to not algo trade there with anything; instead, I am staking BTT to earn their 8% annual staking interest.
Amazon affiliates managed to pull in $30 again this month; I think I've figured out the key to getting some affiliate sales hits: DIY project videos like those for my thermoelectric generator builds, or charging eskate batteries with solar, have resulted in these sales. So now I know what to work on for video ideas if I want to target affiliate sales on Amazon! For the moment though, the target should still be audience growth.
On the Youtube side of things, growth has stagnated again. Mildly frustrating as I try to build engaging videos to be both helpful and entertaining. Revenue saw a minor uptick, but actual viewership metrics saw a slight downtick. I am only doing slightly better than my metrics at this point last year for daily viewers; which is daft considering I've been consistently putting out better content, improving my SEO, and narrowing in on a more focused set of topics.
Here's an updated look at the trailing past 365 days:
It will really help to look at the exact metrics this month and see how they compare to the month prior to see the actual downturn:
- Published five main videos, keeping up with target of one per week (days in month worked out to have five weekly release windows)
- At 3,651 subscribers, up 191 over last month
- Subscriber growth rate: 5.52%, down from last month's 6.04%
- Average daily views throughout August: 530, a decrease over last month's 546; or a -2.93% decrease
- Average daily subscribers throughout August: 7, on par with last month's average of 7
Starting now and lasting all through September and half of October, I'm taking a semi-hiatus from Youtube. Not because of any burnout or disappointment in the continuing downtrend in metrics; but because I'm getting married! I'll need to dedicate more of my time on weekends to help plan and get my own stuff in order for it (writing vows, anyone?). So for now, my video output will drop to maybe one or two a month until I'm on the other side! Might be good for me to take a break and stave off any burnout from actually happening. Will be good to breathe and review what's been working for my channel and what hasn't, to hit the ground running with a new sense of focus after the hiatus.
I can only imagine what havok this will have on my metrics over the next couple months...
And the last point of discussion about Youtube, is that--for some reason--I am getting my earnings taxed before they get sent to me for US withholdings. Which seems weird, as--as a Canadian--I filled out their form claiming a 0% withholding rate due to being in a tax treaty with the united states. As it stands now, I am effectively being taxed twice... This is no bueno. One of my first orders of business for this coming month's work items is to get that sorted out. I've already lost close to $100 due to these withholdings.
In the cryptocurrency mining space, I had a lot of problem solving with the mining rigs this month. As you remember from last month, one of my work items was to work on Mining Rig 4 and return to active service, including swapping the fans on two GPUs. Well, I succeeded! I wound up having to completely reinstall Windows (went back to windows 8.1; windows 10 just doesn't want to play nicely with AMD gpus mining). Much more stable after eliminating a few problem algos; Mining Rig 4 is one of the most stable rigs now for the moment.
Aside from that, I had another GPU have a fan die on it, leaving me with 3 GPUs currently down and needing fan replacements (I will be attending to that this month).
But the MOST craziest thing that happened in the mining space this month, was my sixth mining rig going kaput. Just suddenly, the smell of burnt plastic and suddenly the rig would not detect all my GPUs. After a couple days of sleuthing I thought it was something screwy with the motherboard, so I bought a replacement motherboard and CPU (since that was cheaper than just outright replacing the exact motherboard).
However, the issue wound up being a fried PSU connector that was powering the GPU risers. Once I swapped to a different set of SATA power connectors, the problem was solved, so now I am left with a brand new motherboard and CPU. What am I to do?
Get started on Mining Rig 7, of course! I'll start gathering more parts to build Mining Rig 7 this month.
Speaking of mining, one of my work items for this past month was to investigate what's good with Proof of Capacity (hard drive mining) projects. Turns out, Burst was renamed to Signum, and still seems to be the leading project in the space; so back into that project I go! Gonna start fresh and re-plot all my hard drives. I've accumulated quite a few; I currently have about 22TB of mineable capacity split between nine drives.
And there's still yet more to talk about in the cryptocurrency arena--I have been quite experimental in this space this month:
For one, I forgot about my referrals still accruing on Binance even though I've stopped using it as a platform due to the pending ban of Ontario users on it's platform. Wonder how long I'll continue to accrue referral payments on there before I get outright cut off...
The last cryptocurrency-related project I toyed around with this past month was related to BTT. In addition to staking it on Poloniex, I tried to earn some by setting up a laptop as a torrent seed box with Bittorrent Speed; a newer Bittorrent client that has implemented a method for offering others preferred download speeds by letting them pay you in BTT.
Well, I seeded about 20TB worth of uploads, and didn't see a single satoshi of BTT get paid out to me. Not to mention, the known sketchiness of the project owner and the fact that transferring BTT off-app has been broken for a while, this has been a resounding failure! Can't win them all though, so I'll simply mark this one as a failure and stick to just staking and see where it goes.
As for project wins, I had a surprising thing happen in the Print on Demand space--I not only had my first sale on Teepublic this month; but I also had my first sale on Zazzle this past month too! Took it long enough...
I still have it on the backlog to expand to more and more Print on Demand sites. Maybe I'll work one in this coming month, but I have some other stuff I want to focus on more.
One major focus I want to look at going forward is to lean heavily on my expertise and experience in programming. I literally do it for my day job; I really should lean on it more for passive income project ideas. I want to brainstorm up some ideas that can be monetized passively with minimal overhead after deployment (automation is the name of the game)
I also miss working on my novel. I got burnt out on it for a bit, but I think I'm ready to start working on it again, although it's relatively low priority. I think I'll work in a review of existing chapters and refine with updated ideas of story direction for this month, in order to refresh my memory of what I've written thus far.
One of the last points of discussion is my drive to hit 200 active listings for flipping; I came really close! As of this post I am currently at 191!
I'm actually proud that I managed to complete ALL work items I set out for myself this past month. Hopefully I can keep that trend going!
In detail, here's what I had set out to do during August, and the results:
- Four new main Mike in the Woods videos
Completed 5, but only because of how the release windows stacked up - Further steps on fixing Mining Rig 004 and returning to active service
Completed entirely, back in active service and mining stable - Three new listings in any combination of 3D Printing (MyMiniFactory
& Shapeways) OR Print on Demand (Redbubble, Society6, Teepublic,
Zazzle)
Completed: Two 3D Printing, one Print on Demand - Investigate Proof of Capacity (hard drive mining) projects
Completed, and further HDD capacity has been acquired in preparation - Continue to list Flipping listings, targeting 200 active listings (currently at 171)
Increased listing count to current active count of 191 - Clean up back log of work items of stuff that's no longer relevant
Completed
For September, I might be biting off WAY more than I can chew, especially because I have to spend more and more time getting ready for the wedding; but here's what I'd like to accomplish in an ideal scenario:
- Two new Mike in the Woods videos; temporary output reduction due to wedding semi-hiatus
- Solve the USA Chapter 3 Tax Withholding issue with Youtube Adsense payments
- Replace fans on downed GPUs (3) and return to active service
- Get Mining Rig 7 operational, at minimum as a load spreader if the three fixed GPUs do not want to play nicely with existing rigs (AMD cards seem to have an issue playing nicely with one another)
- Brainstorm potential software development passive income ideas, and refine to three candidates
- Review novel draft thus far, and refine with newer story ideas and direction
- Enable hats & other new products on all Redbubble listings
- Plot first set of five hard drives for Signum mining and get operational
- Hit and maintain 200 active Flipping listings
Quite a heavy work load, and I probably won't get to all of it; but it at least gives me a prioritized subset of things to work on throughout September.
Lastly, of course, we take a look at my investments and how they performed:
This month saw a huge recovery in the crypto market, and Stocks didn't perform too poorly either! I saw a 36.26% portfolio gain month-over-month, bringing me back up over the $50k mark in investments. To the moon, baby! Crushed that target 6.5% MoM target, and almost 10x where I should be at this time on my path to FIRE by 40!
Going forward, starting with this post, I want to track what my exact breakdown is for investment vehicles (as a percent of my portfolio), so I can see how it changes from month to month (spoiler alert, it's going to be very crypto heavy). I backfilled it from the beginning of this year.
You can see the trend of Cryptocurrency just outright stomping stocks in terms of gains. Risky allocations...
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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