Monthly Report, July-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
31/07/14	2.675	0.01397	0.00002390	191.503	111,912

* 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	~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%
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
28/02/14	111,042
31/03/14	167,198
30/04/14	245,885
31/05/14	424,209
30/06/14	479,689
31/07/14	455,570

	Stats of holders on 31st-July
< 10 unit	13
[10 – 100)	7
[100 – 1000)	20
[1k – 10k)	29
>= 10k	12
TOTAL	81

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.

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 unit	11
[10 – 100)	9
[100 – 1000)	19
[1k – 10k)	31
>= 10k	12
TOTAL	82

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.

XMM Utilities.

sourcecode: https://github.com/ripplerm/XMM-utilities

The page contains some basic tools that I had developed to perform tasks related to XMM. Currently there's only two on the list.


1. Holder Statistic: (http://ripplerm.github.io/XMM-utilities/holders.html)

This will show a simple statistics of XMM holders, categorised with holding-size . For those who are not familiar with maths language,  an " [100 -1000) " expression means 'greater-or-equal to 100, and less than 1000'.

The "List All Holders" checkbox, if ticked, will return a full list of holder's account, together with their number of holdings in XMM units.


2. XMM's value Estimation: (http://ripplerm.github.io/XMM-utilities/nav.html)
The tool do a simple calculation of the NAV (Net-Assets-Value) of XMM units.

It's performing the task in three simple steps:

1. sum up the assets from all accounts of XMM. 
2. check with RippleCharts.com the prices of USD, CNY, and BTC measured in XRP.
3. measure values of XMM's assets with the exchange rates, and hence NAV per XMM.

Several thing worth pointing out here -- 

First, we are using 1-hr-average exchange-rates from RippleCharts.com (see RippleData-API ). In my opinion, average prices over certain time-range is the more suitable figures than spot prices for measuring the value of assets. I think one-hour-average is a good reference given the high volatility of XRP, but people may have different arguments regarding the best range.

Then, though we understand that same kind of IOUs by different issuers may have different market value, for sake of simplicity I use only single price for each assets class. (to be particular, prices of USD.Bitstamp, BTC.Bitstamp and CNY.RippleChina are used for USD, BTC and CNY). And for those IOUs of low trading volume (EUR, XAG, etc), their market rates in Ripple are sometimes absent or too volatile due to thin-volume and high-spread. Hence their prices in XRP are instead calculated with price of USD and a given exchange-rates (this is what those input-boxes are there for). 

I hope this tool could help some XMM holders to evaluate the underlying-value of our Fund. A similar codes were used by the bot that's performing our automatic redemption/new-issue offers. 

Warning:
I'm newb in codings... So, please be aware that these tools may contain tons of bugs and unpredictable behaviour. Do not expect them to always provide accurate result.


Thanks:
to hmalmedal (https://github.com/hmalmedal), whose ripple-utilities codes helped me a lots in learning basic javascript with ripple-lib.

and also Steven Zeiler, whose videos on Youtube is another great resource!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtDBLDfob7PNhdvhl4Gy2zPkK4z3rPBxR

Moving towards Automation.

Automation of Buyback-Mechanism
Date of Commencement: 18-June-2014, Wednesday.

Since the beginning of this project, the buy-back mechanism of our Fund was being done manually, which consumed lots of my time and energy.

Recently I managed to build a bot for monitoring the NAV (net asset value) of our Fund, and adjusting buyback price accordingly. I had been testing the bot for more than two weeks and it seems to work quite well. Hence, I had made a decision to put the buy-back mechanism of XMM into automation.

Starting from the next Wednesday, the tasks of updating buy-back/new-sell quotes from Hotwallet will be done by a bot on my computer.

Configurations of the Bot.
Spread: 
The buy-back and new-issue prices will be quoted with a spread of ~5%,
i.e. selling new units at ~2.5% premium, and buying-back at ~2.5% discount to NAV.

Volume: 
The volume quoted on each side will be equivalent to about 5% of total unit-in-circulation.

Update interval: 
The bot will be adjusting the prices every one hour. However, this 1-hour-interval is not a guarantee since it may be impacted by many factors... e.g. the bot may not be able to update XMM prices when queries to Rippled-servers/RippleCharts fail, when facing slow network connection, power-failure, insufficient fund in hotwallet, etc.


More Bots for market-making.
Others bots had been developed to help performing some market-making tasks for our Fund.

As a test start, we had already automated our support for XAG/XRP pair with a bot few days ago. If everything proceed smoothly, more bots will be deployed for other currency pairs from next week onwards.

We hope that with the automation processes, our Fund could perform the tasks more efficiently, and be able to provide more liquidity for more currencies pairs in Ripple ecosystem.

Wish that my workload will decrease significantly thereafter, and I shall move on to other projects.
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Monthly Report, May-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

* 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%

3-months return (28/2 ~ 31/5)

208.4%

-12.4%

-17.1%

59.6%

Review and Comment:
In May, NAV of our fund appreciate 19% against XRP. However, it depreciated 9% against USD, and losing 34% as compared to BTC. Taking the average, our fund was suffering a loss of 8% during the month.

Reasons for the poorer performance in May:

• Increase in Fund size. (profitability tends to drop with bigger size of fund).
• Fund manager was on vacation during the last 10 days of the month, hence no trading or market-making activities during that period.
• I was spending more time on learning API and coding skill for developing some trading bots, hence less time was allocated for monitoring the markets and performing trades.

For the 3-months period ended 31st-May, our Fund recorded a +59.6% total return in average.


Market Making Activities
For BTC/XRP markets (about half of our assets was allocated for BTC/XRP) -- Our main focus was on Bitstamp and btc2ripple, and smaller support on Justcoin and The Rock Trading.

For Fiats-IOUs -- our main focus were still in USD and CNY, for the gateways Bitstamp, SnapSwap, RippleChina and RippleCN, with smaller amount of support for USD.RippleSingapore. We are considering to allocate some little resources for the IOUs of new members on IRBA list, namely Coinex and Bitso.

About 8% of our asset was allocated for silver market of XAG.RippleSingapore.
It's likely to add gold (XAG.RippleSingapore) into our portfolio in near future.


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

	Number of holders on 31st-May
< 10 unit	8
[10 – 100)	7
[100 – 1000)	22
[1k – 10k)	30
>= 10k	10
TOTAL	77

Buy-back and New Issue
About 178k new units of XMM was issued during the month, represent an increase of >70% units-in-circulation as compared to end of April. The buy-back and new-issue prices were quoted with spread of ~7% most of time.

After some efforts learning nodejs and ripple-lib, I manage to develop a simple bot for monitoring NAV of our Fund and adjusting the buyback price automatically. The bot is still in beta and I'm testing it with a personal trading account. If everything work out smoothly, then the buyback mechanism of our Fund will probably be made fully automated soon (an official announcement will be made through this blog-page before any change taking effect).

If the automation of buyback mechanism is implemented successfully, XMM will then choose to stay in its current profit-accumulated model. Anyway, since we had seen a strong demand for dividend-payment fund from the discussions on xrptalks.org, I may consider to launch a new fund in profit-payout model (provided that I got extra time/energy for it).


Others
Recently I'm spending more time and effort in coding, for the automation of market-making activities. I hope that with the help of some trading bots, my workload may be decreased significantly. Then our Fund would be able to provide liquidity for more currency pairs and more gateways in the future.

There are also ideas of launching some low-risk funds (only trading single currency) in which market-making processes are totally automated with bots, and profit are being distributed through dividends.

And I'm happy to see that we got competitor now -- FMM fund operated by RippleFox.
Some dicussions and references about FMM:
https://xrptalk.org/topic/2567-ripplefox-market-making-fund/
https://xrptalk.org/topic/2738-ripplefox-fmm-updates/

Wish there will be more market-makers joining Ripple, for better health of the ecosystem.

Monthly Report, April-2014.

Unit Value and Return Rate
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	40300
31/03/14	1.426	0.01306	0.00002755	109.14	51761
30/04/14	2.590	0.01370	0.00003103	188.98	83466

* 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%

Review and Comment:
In April, XMM values appreciate more than 80% against XRP, mainly due to the sharp fall of XRP price during the month. The value of our Fund increase only 4.9% against USD, and 12.6% against BTC.

To eliminate the effect of exchange-rates fluctuation, I think the more suitable gauge for our Fund's performance is the average of the above three figures. The +33% return in April is again well above our internal target of 10% per month.


Market Making Activities
For BTC/XRP markets -- our Fund had gradually diversify away from Bitstamp into other gateways' iou (during March it was about 70% weigh on Bitstamp). As the size of our Fund growing, we are now able to provide more liquidity for more markets (Justcoin, The Rock Trading, btc2ripple), and our portfolio had also become more balanced.

For Fiats-IOUs -- we are still focusing on USD and CNY only, for the major four gateways (Bitstamp, SnapSwap, RippleChina and RippleCN). A new gateway that made into our portfolio is USD.RippleSingapore.

Experimentally, we are now trading some small amount of XAG.RippleSingapore. On the other hand, we had temporarily gave up supporting Frictionless-VirtualGateway project due to limited time and energy.


Units and Holders Analysis

	Unit in Circulation
28/02/14	111,042
31/03/14	167,198
30/04/14	245,885

	Number of holders on 30th-April
< 10 units	5
[ 10 – 100 )	6
[ 100 – 1000 )	17
[ 1k – 10k )	22
>= 10k units	12
TOTAL	62

Buy-back and New Issue
About 78k new units of XMM was issued during the month.
Buyback and NewSale prices were quoted with spread of ~7% most of time.

Due to the high fluctuation of XRP lately, the price of XMM had to be adjusted more frequent than I was expecting. As such, I'm considering to convert the Fund from current profit-accumulated model into a dividend-payout model, in a hope to free myself from the loads of monitoring, calculating value and adjusting price.

A poll had been created on xrptalk, hope to hear some feedback or discussion from XMM holders: https://xrptalk.org/topic/2375-poll-xmm-to-use-dividend-payout-model/.

Others
I'm having a two-weeks-vacation starting 21th-May. During that period I may be totally off-line, hence you will probably see no activities of market-making from the trading accounts of XMM. Also, the Buyback and New-sales offers may be temporarily halted.