Saturday Savers 2025 Progress Report - Week 45

It's Saturday, and what a week it's been ! Here's my #SaturdaySavers update, although it's fair to say it's going to be a bit all over the place....

Image by Rupert Kittinger-Sereinig from Pixabay

How Did The Week Go ?

I'm not posting a spreadsheet of how close I am (or aren't) to hitting goals, because after the last week or two I need to completely revisit what my goals look like.

So what happened ?

• The price of HIVE continued to be volatile, dropping hard again at the start of the week although with some recovery towards the end of it.
• HBD lost its peg on CoinGecko, spending several days at the 90-92 cent mark and with very high volatility. However, within most Hive places (particularly on HiveDex, but with an honourable exception in PeakD which shows CoinGecko's price) it showed different values around the 98-99 cent mark. Hivedex is particularly obscure because it focuses on the HBD/HIVE exchange rate, and is best described as "optimistic" in the dollar value it assigns to HBD.

From a personal point of view, HBD dropped below my stop loss point. I set myself a value of £0.09 as a stop loss. While that is significantly above the haircut level, recent events have showed that I was right to set it there. If there had been another drop as sharp as the one around a fortnight ago, we'd have been at or very close to the haircut level. My appetite for risk isn't that high !

My response to this was entirely based on rules I'd set for myself, to try to remove any emotion from the equation.

• First, I took all my HBD out of savings. That took 3 days, during which time HIVE dropped about a cent.

• Second, I converted around 1000 of the HBD emerging from savings into HIVE. That took longer than I expected, and demonstrated that when the system is under stress liquidity cannot be relied on.

• The remaining HBD mostly stays as HBD but not in savings, allowing a much faster response to whatever happens next. I'll put it back in savings if HIVE shows it can consistently stay at around £0.10 or above. Otherwise I'll convert it to HIVE if the price dips again.

• The HBD converted to HIVE gave me 8977 HIVE. I moved 5000 of it into Binance and converted 4000 of it to BTC. This takes advantage of the dip in the price of BTC, and as an investment BTC has made me far, far more than HIVE. I started investing fiat in both HIVE and BYC at about the same time and rate. Right now, even with the dip my BTC is worth around three times what I paid for it. My Hive portfolio, even with earnings on top, is worth around 75% of what I paid for it.

• The remaining HIVE will stay liquid for now. I'll decide what I do with it based on relative prices - I may power it up into HP, buy HBD back at a better rate than I sold it for, or move it to Binance and buy more BTC or perhaps a gold-backed stablecoin.

• A key focus now is to recover my initial investment. So far I've only got back £386 due to the low price of HIVE, but the way things were looking at the beginning of the week I was taking the view that getting anything back was a bonus if HIVE and HBD dropped to zero. I expect the recovered value to increase as the price of BTC recovers. I'll sell more HIVE off if the price is above the rate at which I converted it from HBD.

• Throughout all this, I have not powered down any HP. The timescale is long enough that it's too slow to respond to rapidly changing circumstances. But more importantly, it reflects my view of Hive; I want to recover my original investment, but value Hive hugely as a social place to be, and want it to continue. Not having to think in terms of "have I lost all my money" will allow me to approach it with a healthier mindset.

So all in all, it's been a week of crisis management, taking steps to mitigate the potential loss if the price of HIVE dropped to HBD haircut level. In the process, it made me think very hard about my relationship with Hive.

I'm going to have to re-set all my goals, and focusing on recovering my initial investment over time will enable me to go forward with a much healthier approach. Although HBD interest has been the main earner for the last year or so, I have realised that it is too high a risk as a long term investment, and it's better to focus on growing HP organically.

If you're not familiar with SaturdaySavers, it's a fabulous initiative run by @shanibeer writing as @sally-saver on the @eddie-earner account, where we all support each other in getting to our savings goals.

If you are one of my friends reading this (or just someone who tripped over one of my posts), I really recommend this as a great community that's well worth joining.

I'm normally very disorganised about saving, and the support of the wonderful people in #SaturdaySavers has been invaluable in keeping me focused. I can honestly say that without it, my HP would probably be half what it is now.

So join ! You don't have to wait until the start of the year. The best time to start saving is ten years ago. The second best time is right now !