Thursday 31 July 2014

Monthly Report, July-2014


Unit Value and Return Rate
Historical NAV of XMM unit, measured in different currencies:




(exchange rate)^

XMM/XRPXMM/USD*XMM/BTC*USD/XRPBTC/XRP
28/02/141.0000.014200.0000248170.4440,300
31/03/141.4260.013060.00002755109.1451,761
30/04/142.5900.013700.00003103188.9883,466
31/05/143.0840.012430.00002057248.08149,903
30/06/143.4330.013120.00002153261.646159,415
31/07/142.6750.013970.00002390191.503111,912

* Calculated based on the exchange-rates listed on the right columns.
^ exchange-rates are vwap of IOU.Bitstamp on the last day of each month (source: ripplecharts.com).


Montly return rate, measured in different currencies:


~XRP~USD~BTCaverage
Mar-201442.6%-8.0%11.0%15.2%
Apr-201481.6%4.9%12.6%33.0%
May-201419.1%-9.3%-33.7%-8.0%
Jun-201411.3%5.5%4.7%7.2%
Jul-2014-22.1%6.5%11.0%-1.5%

3-months Return
(30/4 ~ 31/7)		3.3%1.9%-23.0%-5.9%

Review and Comment:
During the month, NAV of our fund dropped 22% against XRP, but appreciated 6.5% against USD and 11% against BTC. The average figure was a loss of 1.5%. For the 3-months period ended 31st-Jul, our Fund experience a loss of 5.9% in average.

July was the first full-month in which our market-making tasks were fully operated by bots. It seems that our bots were not doing well during a high-volatile period like July. One of the reasons is because our bots were configured to make-market with some minimal spreads which is not enough to cover the risk in a highly-volatile environment.

I will be keep adjusting the trading-logics and configurations of our bots to balance between providing-liquidity-to-market and making-profit-for-holders.


XMM's Contribution to Liquidity
Here's some tables that show our trading volume during the last 7-days of July (25/7~31/7).

BTC/XRP and BTC/USD markets:

 XMM Trade Volume % of Total volume
BTC.Bitstamp / XRP BTC 12.86 1.50%
BTC.SnapSwap / XRP BTC 18.55 2.33%
BTC.JustCoin / XRP BTC 3.25 4.02%
BTC.TheRock / XRP BTC 0.36 16.07%

BTC.Bitstamp / USD.Bitstamp BTC 1.17 0.44%
BTC.Bitstamp / USD.SnapSwap BTC 1.18 5.11%
BTC.SnapSwap / USD.Bitstamp BTC 1.62 5.33%
BTC.SnapSwap / USD.SnapSwap BTC 2.9 3.21%

 (* BTC/USD pairs were added to our supported lists during second half of July.)


Fiats/XRP and Fiats/USD markets:

 XMM Trade Volume % of Total volume
USD.Bitstamp / XRP USD 5,644 0.48%
USD.SnapSwap / XRP USD 5,225 1.81%
CNY.RippleChina / XRP CNY 33,535 3.41%
CNY.RippleCN / XRP CNY 34,319 4.67%
EUR.SnapSwap / XRP EUR 878 4.77%
EUR.TheRock / XRP EUR 59 18.48%
NZD.Coinex / XRP NZD 109 11.48%

USD.Bitstamp / CNY.RippleChina USD 2,358 4.48%
USD.Bitstamp / CNY.RippleCN USD 2,621 3.60%
USD.SnapSwap / CNY.RippleChina USD 2,625 15.73%
USD.SnapSwap / CNY.RippleCN USD 2,448 11.41%
USD.Bitstamp / EUR.SnapSwap USD 160 5.40%
USD.Bitstamp / EUR.TheRockTrading USD 7.5 0.09%
USD.Bitstamp / NZD.Coinex USD 9.5 50.00%


Metals markets:

 XMM Trade Volume % of Total volume
XAG.RippleSingapore / XRP XAG 0.028705 0.02%
XAU.RippleSingapore / XRP XAU 0.3557 12.9%
XAG.RippleSingapore / USD.Bitstamp XAG 0.08106 0.07%
XAU.RippleSingapore / USD.Bitstamp XAU 0.1671 6.92%


All data above were obtained through queries with RippleCharts API. 
(a simple tool available at: http://ripplerm.github.io/XMM-utilities/volume.html)


Units and Holders Analysis


Unit in Circulation
28/02/14111,042
31/03/14167,198
30/04/14245,885
31/05/14424,209
30/06/14479,689
31/07/14455,570


Stats of holders on 31st-July
< 10 unit13
[10 – 100)7
[100 – 1000)20
[1k – 10k)29
>= 10k12
TOTAL81


Unit-in-circulation decrease by ~24k or 5% as compared to end-of-June. The issuing/redemption processes was fully automated since June. Quotes from hotwallet was maintained at ~5% spread through out the whole month of July.


Others
I had just launch a new virtual-gateway named Ripple Dividend. It could be considered an extension of XMM project -- Ripple Dividend will raise fund through issuing IOUs, try to make profit from market-making and distribute its earning to the holders in the form of XRP dividends. A portion of the gross-profit would be retained for covering the operation cost.

Contrast to XMM, Ripple Dividend will be mostly concentrating on some mature markets of low-volatility, in which our bots work better as compared to XRP-market. Its funds might be more suit to the needs of those who are uncomfortable with the high-volatility of XRP prices. The initial sales of four IOUs -- FMM, USD, CNY, BTC was launched yesterday. Please visit blog.rippledividend.com for more info.

I will be keep managing XMM in a non-profit manner. In future, XMM might be gradually switching away from some mature-markets, and giving more supports to those less-popular currency pairs.

Tuesday 8 July 2014

Monitoring XMM's Trading Volume

A main objective of XMM project is to improve liquidity in Ripple ecosystem. Thus it might be a concern to our holders that how much volume actually had we contributed to the markets.

I didn't have a tool to keep track of our volume, until the implementation of this ripple-data-api -- "market_traders" on RippleCharts.com (read the documentation here: http://docs.rippledataapi.apiary.io/). Then a simple web-tool had just been developed for the ease of XMM-holders to monitor our trading volume.

the tool: http://ripplerm.github.io/XMM-utilities/volume.html
(sourcecode available on XMM-utilities.)

Simple Guide:
1. select the Base and Counter Currency, as well as their issuers (leave blank for XRP).
2. select a time rage (the API only support 24h, 3d or 7d).
3. select a start-time for the period.
4. click submit.

It will show the volume traded by XMM accounts for the currency-pair during the selected period. The top-10 traders for the selected market will be listed out, if the "List Top Trader" box was checked. You may compare the figures of this tool with the ones on http://www.ripplecharts.com/#/active_accounts.

Queries with the tool show that XMM is now among the top market-makers for BTC.SnapSwap, BTC.JustCoint, BTC.TheRock, USD.SnapSwap, USD.RippleSingapore, CNY.RippleChina, CNY.RippleCN, EUR.SnapSwap, EUR.TheRockTrading, NZD.Coinex, and XAG.RippleSingapore. Our contributions to BTC.Bitstamps and USD.Bitstamp are less significant when compared to Market's Total-Volume, although the absolute volume on these markets are highest within our accounts.


A more universal version of this tool was published on ripple-utilities, which you could manually key-in any currency-code & issuer-address, and any trading account that you might like to monitor.

Monthly Report, June-2014


Unit Value and Return Rate
Historical NAV of XMM unit, measured in different currencies:


(exchange rate)^

XMM/XRP XMM/USD* XMM/BTC* USD/XRP BTC/XRP
28/02/14 1.000 0.01420 0.00002481 70.44 40,300
31/03/14 1.426 0.01306 0.00002755 109.14 51,761
30/04/14 2.590 0.01370 0.00003103 188.98 83,466
31/05/14 3.084 0.01243 0.00002057 248.08 149,903
30/06/14 3.433 0.01312 0.00002153 261.646 159,415

* Calculated based on the exchange-rates listed on the right columns.
^ exchange-rates are vwap of IOU.Bitstamp on the last day of each month (source: ripplecharts.com).
Montly return rate, measured in different currencies:


 ~XRP ~USD ~BTC average
Mar-2014 42.6% -8.0% 11.0% 15.2%
Apr-2014 81.6% 4.9% 12.6% 33.0%
May-2014 19.1% -9.3% -33.7% -8.0%
Jun-2014 11.3% 5.5% 4.7% 7.2%

3-months Return
(31/3 ~ 30/6)		 140.7% 0.4% -21.8% 39.8%

Review and Comment:
During the month, NAV of our fund appreciate 11% against XRP, 5.5% against USD, and 4.7% against BTC. The average figure was ~7% which is slightly below our internal target (10%). For the 3-months period ended 30th-Jun, our Fund recorded about +40% total return in average.

As compared to previous months, price of XRP was relatively stable throughout the whole month of June. Hence, in my opinion, the return rate in June was quite a good reference for measuring our fund's profitability in market-making.


Market Making Activities
About 30% of our assets was allocated for BTC/XRP markets. According to the data from RippleCharts.com, our fund contributed about 2% of total trading volume for BTC.Bitstamp/XRP during the final week of June (24/6~30/6). In the same period, our contribution to the liquidity of BTC.btc2ripple, BTC.Justcoin and BTC.TheRockTrading were ~6%, ~7% and ~43% respectively.

About half of our fund's allocation were for Fiat-IOUs market. Our Fund contributed ~1% and ~7% volume respectively to USD.Bitstamp/XRP and USD.SnapSwap/XRP market (in last week of June). The figures were ~4% for both CNY.RippleChina and CNY.RippleCN markets.
Two new currencies, EUR and NZD, were added into our supported list during the month. Since then XMM had become one of the major market-makers for EUR.SnapSwap, EUR.TheRockTrading, and NZD.Coinex.

About 11% of our asset was allocated for metal markets. Our main focus was still on XAG.RippleSingapore/XRP, with smaller portion for XAG/USD. During the month we had expanded our support to XAU, though the volume was still very small.


Units and Holders Analysis


 Unit in Circulation
28/02/14 111,042
31/03/14 167,198
30/04/14 245,885
31/05/14 424,209
30/06/14 479,689


Number of holders on 30th-June
< 10 unit11
[10 – 100)9
[100 – 1000)19
[1k – 10k)31
>= 10k12
TOTAL82


Buy-back and New Issue
About 55k of new XMM was issued during the month, a mild increase of ~13% as compared to May.

The issuing/redemption processes was fully automated in mid of June. Since then the buy-back and new-sale prices were updated hourly, and spread was maintained at 5%. The quoted volume on both side was set at ~5% of units-in-circulation, which is lower than when it was done manually.

Others
June-2014 was a significant period for XMM, where we gradually switched towards automation.

We hope that with the help of bots we could make-market more efficiently in future. However, due to my inexperience in coding, our bots are still far from optimized and thus could have some negative impact to the performance of our Fund. Yet, I'm glad to sacrifice some profitability, for able to inject higher volume into Ripple ecosystem and help tightening the spreads.

From July onwards I'll become more free, and am thinking about launching some new funds.

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