Between the price of STEEM being so low and many people not understanding the voting bots; the auction market is hard to achieve a profitable upvote at this moment. People make bids based on the green highlight thinking they are having a profitable bid but it turns out creating a negative ROI for them and everyone before them.
I went to the market this morning and saw that @shares was profitable according to the steembottracker website.
So I scrolled up a little bit and input my proposed bid into the calculator. I suggest you do this before you make any bid, it will show you hypothetical vote value if no one bids behind you.
Please note that the vote calculator says I will be recieving a 0.37 USD vote. Below you will see I only recieved a 0.33 USD vote.
The calculator says I will loose 0.01 SBD and gain 0.02 Steem at current rates.
Here is the updated bidbot auction afterwards, as you can see the bid values have increased by 0.1 to reflect my bid.
Here is a copy of what the vote calculator said would be the value of a 0.1 bid would be if someone were to bid behind us. It claims to be profitable but check my math below to see the small loss you would have gotten by bidding on this "profitable" auction.
The auction was soon over and here is the end result screen which indicates I would get back 0.15 SBD after curation:
Lets's check the numbers and see how I did.
If we convert the STEEM back to SBD this vote would be worth 0.10093 or .101 at the current conversion ratios. If STEEM rises before the payout our payout could drop into the negative.
In conclusion:
The green highlight at the bidbottracker site doesn't guarantee you a profit.
Compare the numbers I have circled in blue and red below for a quick estimation of profit or not before you use the bidbot calculator.
If you can't read the print on the picture above:
If the number in blue is around >= 2/3 the number in red your vote will be break even or loss
If the number in blue is around <= 1/2 the number in red your vote will be profitable on SBD + STEEM
This whole article assumes the bid bot will be bidding after 30 mins and will get a portion of your curation, if it bids before 30 mins on your article this information will not be correct as you will receive part of the bots curation rewards.
Questions or comments below: