A new series: tracking my Chaos Legion ROI (Episode 1)

Hi everyone! If you've seen my posts before, a lot of them deal with the economics of splinterlands, the value of certain tokens (post here), and the expected value of packs (post here). Most recently, I posted about the expected value of airdrops under a few cases (post here).

But all of these posts have been forward looking. At no point have I gone back to evaluate my decisions and predictions. This is something I think is generally lacking in the crypto space, where people are very quick to go back when they were right (as I was vindicated in saying CL packs would be <$4 on the marketplace), but not so quick to point out when they were wrong. So I'm going to do what I can to make it better.

The planned series of articles

Which brings me to this new series, where I'll be tracking my ROI on my chaos legion investment. My plan is to do an update after every airdrop, see the value of the new airdrop, and see how packs and previous airdrops have appreciated. Once chaos legion is sold out, I'll probably do one every month or so. I might also do additional ones throughout if there are other big updates (e.g. once we get firm info on land).

My initial investment

So to start, what did I spend?

I spent $4,000 + 150 vouchers (available @$2 right before I used them, so we'll value that at $300 for a total of $4,300) on 1150 packs. So this will be my initial investment value that I'll be basing ROI calculations on throughout.

Based on airdrop chances and my valuation of them, I then sold some on the market and bought new ones until I had bought a total of 1750 packs (for 5x airdrops 4-6). I ended up with 972 packs and 55 Hive.

The comparator strategy

But there is an opportunity cost to every action. Here, the main alternative way to invest in chaos legion packs is buying them on the marketplace, where they sell for less than in the store, but they don't have airdrop chances. Based on my valuation, it was worth it to buy it in the store, but this will allow us to test it prospectively.

For this strategy, I'll assume the person executing it had decent, but not perfect timing, and spend $4,300 on packs when packs were $3 on the market, giving them 1433 packs.

ROI on day 2

Strategy 1: Packs from the store

Packs are less expensive in the marketplace than in the store (as expected), and none of the airdrops have dropped. If we sold the 972 packs at market price today, we'd get $3295. In addition, those 972 packs give 291,200 airdrop points, which in the past two day have given 53 SPS worth $7.95. for an ROI of -23%.

Strategy 2: Packs from the marketplace

The marketplace price for packs has gone up from $3, so if we sold our 1,433 packs, we'd get $4,857. In addition, those 1,433 packs give 429,900 airdrop points, which in the past two days would have given 78 SPS worth $11.7. Tis gives a total ROI of 13%.

Comparison

In a very unsurprising state of affairs, the strategy of buying from the marketplace takes an early lead. Packs are less expensive in the market, and no airdrops have happened yet. Hopefully later this week, when they do drop, the gap will be somewhat lessened (although definitely not removed completely; that won't happen, if it does, until almost all the airdrops are out).

Conclusions

It sucks to see a negative ROI, but that was very much expected. One key factor to success in investing is seeing a plan through and not panicking when you see some red. I think our resolve will be tested throughout this, particularly in comparison to seeing the quick easy returns of the alternate strategy. But time will tell which is superior.

Want to see the rest of this series? Give me a follow (the one and only time I'll mention this during the series). I've also tagged this article #roiseries, and will tag all future articles the same if you want to follow that way.

I'd also be interested if you have anything you'd like to see in this comparison! Any specific airdrops you want to track the value of? Any other strategies you think would have been useful? Let me know!

Referral

Like this content? Want to join in the fun? Use my referral link below to join the game, and I'll send you a card to keep (worth ~$1), and a series of cards to use for the first two weeks in the game to get you started!

https://splinterlands.com?ref=badrag