Saturday morning. Boring. So I did a calculation:
Background: I collect monthly rent for a small apartment (in the same building where I live), and send the accumulated rent every 6 months to the apartment owner, who lives in another country. We're friends, so I don't take any profits out of this. This has been going on since the beginning of 2015 and continues to this day.
Monthly rent: $150
Amount sent every 6 months: $900
Net profit for my efforts: $0
So I thought: what if I had invested all those rent amounts in Bitcoin? Suppose I bought BTC at the beginning of each month (when I received the monthly rent), and then, at the end of each 6-month period, I sold the accumulated BTC, sent the $900 to my friend, and kept any profits (or cover any losses incurred). How would that work out?
Prices: Bitstamp Historical Data
Period: 2015-01-01 ~ 2020-07-01
Method: I applied the above scenario, but took the worst case, i.e.,
buying BTC at the highest daily price every 1st of each month (thus obtaining the least amount of BTC), and
selling accumulated BTC at the lowest daily price of the last day of each 6-month period (thus obtaining the least amount of fiat). This is the absolute worst-case scenario, so the net profits (or losses) calculated will be the lowest (or highest) possible, respectively.
Here's what I got:
Overall net profit (from 2015 to 2020): +$4,302.52*It's not much, but it's still better than nothing. This amount is the lowest I could have earned, had I followed my hypothetical scenario above. Instead, what I did was just keeping the rents in my closet (or in the bank). What did I get? Zero, zip, zilch, nada!
I think this is an interesting result, that shows the sheer amount of profits that can be made by smartly (and effortlessly) investing small amounts of fiat you may have lying around (or, perhaps, managing for a friend, like in my case). Note that, applying my scenario above does not involve any data analysis or other effort, this is just blindly applying the above scheduled buy/sell actions without even looking at the price. Of course, this idea could end up in losses, but history has shown that with Bitcoin, gains are virtually guaranteed if you give it enough time to average out the volatility (i.e., the long-term price direction is virtually guaranteed to be upward), so it's almost a win-win situation.
Maybe not
HoDL material, but still an interesting experiment/result IMHO.
(*) Exchange & transaction fees not taken into account.