I came into Splitnerlands in March 2021. In June I started buying cards heavily. The momentum in card buying was incredible. Watching floor get pushed up one by one to the next psychological level higher. I spent about $60k in June-August just strategically buying floors and then watching the fomo put me into serious profit.
Had I been really smart I would have sold those cards when they were worth almost $300k but I didn't. In fact I kept buying. At the peak of the market my Splinterlands fortune was held in just 3500 BCX of cards that I was renting $300 per day. My best day I made $1000 renting.
Almost all of that money got put back into the market buying more cards that today are 1/20th the price I was buying them at then. But if you consider that DEC was worth 20x more then, it makes sense. Card prices have largely just moved with the price of DEC.
Today I have 56k BCX and its worth $43k according to Splex and my rental income is $3 per day but I might be able to optimize that to $10. Of course the make up of my cards is very different than it once was with a as 48,500 BCX having a CL border. Those didn't exist when I joined.
A change in the markets
I've gone on more than a few shopping sprees over the past year as you can see, but today was the first time in a long time I started to get that same feel from the market I was getting back in June of 2021 right before things got really crazy. The market structure is very similar also.
I don't know exactly what it was. I only intended to spend $100 today but as I looked at the market structure, I started to see patterns I hadn't seen in a while. So I just kept dropping in $100 at a time and buying a little more until I'd spent $1000 and decided I had to stop.
And I might have been right to increase my spend today. Once I was done buying, I took note of the floors I'd moved and decided to just sit back and watch. I wanted to see if anything really was different in the market.
What I was looking for was simple. Over the past 6-9 months, every time I've moved a floor, within a few minutes, bots refill it and generally within an hour, the price not only fills in, but it goes lower.
Not today
Today I didn't just move the floor in a card but I moved the entire floor for Alpha commons, Alpha rares, beta commons, beta rares, and gold foil common rewards cards.
Not only are they holding. A few of the floors are now higher than I bought them to. I haven't seen that happen in over a year.
Now I know people are buying for land right now and that's the main amount of buying that is going on. Markets have been trending up both in crypto and in Splinterlands recently. But today seemed different.
I've been looking at some of these beta cards for a week and no one has touched them. Then today I buy up a few floors and suddenly other buyers joined in. That says to me that people are watching these floors carefully and starting to get itchy fingers.
And the sellers are beginning to step back and watch rather than just reloading the floor immediately.
Will this last?
I don't know. All I know is the market is feeling very different than its felt in a long time and it's got me feeling like I don't have enough.
Alpha watch
I'm starting a new Alpha watch. I did this in 2021. I remember posting when the cheapest Alpha hit $1. And then when it hit $4 I cofidently proclaimed it was a new era and we wouldn't see Alphas lower ever again. I ate those words. Recently Alphas got as low as 45 cents.
But today they are back over $1 for the first time in probably 3 months. Let's see if they hold.
Betas got down to under 10 cents. Today I bought them from 17 cents up to 30 cents.
Gold foil commmon reward cards were down to 18 cents. Today I bought everything between .22-.25. There were quite a few at .25 when I was done but they've been at .26 cents for about 5 hours now.
So that's what I'll be watching but ultimately I don't think cards are where the money is. I think its in SPS. The problem is SPS is too hard to buy right now where as buying credits is easy.
Makes you wonder just how much of SPS being so cheap has to do with others having the same problem I'm having. It's just too hard to buy SPS in any great quantity. So the question is, when Splinterlands fixes this problem, will SPS be repriced?