Over the last couple of weeks, we've seen SBD break away from the $1 USD peg a couple times. These are always opportunities for those who hold SBD.
When this happens, you can increase your holdings by selling SBD on an external exchange for BTC or on the internal market for STEEM. You can watch for this at http://www.steemdollar.com/ or you can set an alert on https://www.coinigy.com/.
Usually, there's not much to it. Just transfer your SBD to whichever exchange you prefer (I've been using Poloniex and Bittrex lately). Don't bother trying to perfectly time things because if you're well above $1, you'll make money either way. Just sell at the bid or, based on the amount you want to sell, click a price deeper into the Buy Orders box to cover the full amount of SBD you want to unload.
Once that's done, set a buy order for the same amount of bitcoin you just received for selling your SBD somewhere just about $1. So far, I've found $1.03 works rather well and will get hit eventually. When it does, you'll have more SBD than you started with. Simply rinse and repeat over time to increase your holdings.
You can see here, I sold 300 SBD at 0.00102832 on 4/17/2017. I then set my buy with the same amount of bitcoin and forgot about it. It hit just a few days later at 0.00085000 giving me 362 SBD. When the price spiked again on 4/25/2017, I sold my 362 and again set my buy order which will hit sometime in the future, further increasing my SBD holdings.
This is really simple stuff which anyone can do. It just involves patience and paying attention.
As @clayop and others have mentioned, you can also use the BTC you get from selling SBD and immediately buy STEEM which you can transfer back to your Steemit account and sell on the internal market to keep the cycle going. This gets a little more tricky and will only work for a very short period of time when someone is pumping the price of SBD because the price of STEEM on the internal market will drop down below the open market price due to the temporary high demand for SBD.
Let me walk you through an example. Here's the internal market:
You see a STEEM price of $0.1843 (which is in SBD pricing). The external market is higher than that at $0.2272 (USD pricing):
Is there an opportunity here? Let's run the math and find out:
We'll call that a $1.24 price (with bitcoin around $1268.02 per BTC). Now let's compare the value of 100 STEEM on both the internal and external markets. If there's a big gap, we can increase our holdings more by buying STEEM externally, selling it internally for SBD and then selling that SBD externally to get more STEEM and repeat the process.
External Market:
100 * $0.2272 = $22.72 USD
Internal Market:
100 * $0.1843 = 18.44 SBD * $1.24 = $22.87 USD
So we see here there's about a $0.15 difference from the internal and external market per 100 STEEM. If you had enough volume, you might be able to make that work to your advantage, but you also have to keep in mind how the external exchanges charge a fee with every trade and they charge a fee when you withdraw from your exchange wallet. There's also a lot of slippage on the internal market if the volume isn't high enough to cover your orders at the amounts you want.
This is why it's usually not worth the trouble to buy STEEM on the external market so you can then buy SBD on the internal market in moments like this where SBD is being pumped. Then again, if you already have liquid STEEM in your account, and you notice the SBD pump trend on an external market before the internal market price catches up, you may have a great opportunity to buy SBD at full value with your STEEM and quickly sell it externally for a profit.
I hope that little exercise was helpful to you. The Steem Dollar ticker at http://www.steemdollar.com/ is really helpful for figuring this stuff out. The more people who take advantage of this, the closer the SBD peg will be to $1 USD. If the price of SBD falls below $1 USD, you can use the convert function in your Steemit wallet to get $1 USD worth of STEEM in three days. Don't do this when the price of SBD is above $1 USD or you'll be losing out getting less STEEM than you could by selling on the external market.
I hope you give this a try sometime and realize just how easy it is. If you do, please let me know about it!
Good luck and Steem On.
Note: This is not investing advice, only play with value you can afford to lose, yadda, yadda, you get the drill.
Edit: 4/27/2017: It seems I only had to wait two days for my buy order to hit. 362 SBD is now 479 SBD. :)
