Uniswap

$UNI (+2,06 %) Error in the system? What's going on here 😱?

We have now reached the 10th month of the year. Time for a look back.

The typical disclaimer up front: I am merely sharing my thoughts here, the following is definitely not investment advice or a recommendation.

👉🏼Aktien:

My portfolio is once again seeing an exciting rally at the top. In 1st place is still $WMT (+2,04 %) . I am still surprised at how well the stock has performed recently despite recent problems (full warehouses after the coronavirus order boom...). Since around January we have had a great upward trend in the chart, of course with upward and downward spikes. I'm all the more pleased with this development because I can't see this trend among our competitors. $TGT (+0,51 %) here we have had a long-term downward trend since around May 2022. I am holding on to both retail giants.

Also at the top of the chain, but only in third place is $AVGO (+1,3 %) . I don't think I need to say anything about this top stock. 🚀 And now that they are $VMW are swallowing, they are getting a wide and exciting business area.

Surprising for me is 2nd place with $MSFT (+0,08 %) . This stock is developing well and has now made it into my top 3. Therefore $FDX (+2,71 %) and $FAST (+0,67 %) have slipped to 4th and 5th place but are still hot on the heels of the top 3. Speaking of Microsoft, I've been using M365 Copilot at work. It's amazing what this tool can do, and I only had to generate text based on 3 words, which I practically didn't have to change. I was able to configure exactly whether I wanted formal, informal, long or short text... AI is simply, apart from the general hype, one of the important topics of the future. And the IT company that sleeps through it will suffer greatly later on.

On the lowest floors of the depot tower were the $DHL (-0,87 %) as well as $CVX (+0,88 %) and the $DHR (+1,44 %) spin-off $VLTO WI (+1,53 %) have been added.

I have adjusted the reinvestment of my dividends so that a little more of the dividends are also invested in the $CVX (+0,88 %) and the one at the bottom $O (+1,58 %) flow.

With regard to the $DHL (-0,87 %) I am actually thinking about an exchange into the $UPS (+0,42 %) to DHL. Especially because UPS is domesticating in a business-friendly country, while DHL has to deal with a recession-hit Germany. Or would you prefer another candidate from the banking sector with $JPM (+2,19 %) ?

Apropos: Is Germany becoming the sick man of Europe again?

The development of Reality Income share price is a cause for concern for some investors, but I am continuing to hold on to the stock and am selectively adding to it, as I explained in a post a few days ago.

With the Veralto I am just waiting for a suitable price and will then sell it in order to buy Danaher shares in return. An exception to my strict buy & hold strategy.

The fact that Chevron is currently at the back end of my portfolio doesn't worry me, the figures are right and the Hess takeover is imminent. I'm sure you've heard that too ☺️. Without a doubt, I am still certain: oil has a future! 🛢️Wenn we think of everything in our everyday lives that contains just a drop of crude oil, then a lot of things will disappear from our lives.

All savings plans were fully automated as usual.

👉🏼ETFs:

ETFs are boring, but they are the key vehicle for independent retirement provision for everyone. Here the savings plans do what they are supposed to do.

I love savings plans, everything runs all by itself, like clockwork. If only the masses in Germany would open their eyes and understand how easy individual private pension provision is. Just set up savings plans for broadly diversified ETFs that invest worldwide, including standing orders, and you're done. Add bonuses or increase the savings plan amount as your salary rises and you're done.

👉🏼Crypto:

$BTC (+0,8 %) had decided to leave its previous price zone around USD 26K and climb into a new zone around USD 34K due to the events surrounding the spot ETF. This has the nice side effect that I am now finally in the black with my BTC savings plan. I still remember my very first tranche at the time of the last ATH. The feeling when it went downhill.

For $ETH (+0,14 %) the whole thing doesn't apply yet, but I'm on a very good path, it won't be long now.

$LINK (+1,88 %) and $XRP (+17,14 %) are finally in the black for me too, $DOT (+5,55 %) , $MATIC (+4,35 %) and $UNI (+2,06 %) on the other hand are not. In general, I'm really pleased with this development.

The strategy of accumulating via DCA in a bear market and then cashing out DCA-like in a bull market could really work out. I can honestly recommend this strategy to everyone, as there are no hard assets behind crypto. The motto here is: your losses are my profits and vice versa. I neglect staking and other earnings opportunities in this analysis.

So, as already mentioned in previous posts, I am waiting for the bull market here and then getting out of crypto as far as possible in order to possibly accumulate again in the coming bear market after research. As my altcoin accumulation was already completed this spring, the sell-off will be tax-free next year or early 2025. I will probably only keep BTC and ETH holdings that are not yet tax-free when I sell them.

It's actually a shame that my crypto exposure is still very low compared to the rest, the strategy will hardly be noticeable if successful, but the ETF portfolio will still be happy about the upcoming addition.

👉🏼P2P:

Well, if crypto is doing well, stocks and ETFs are doing well or at least satisfactory, then there must be something that is once again a shot in the arm, right?

That's roughly how it is with P2P for me, with one small exception.

Mintos, Peerberry and EstateGuru are suffering from considerable defaults and withdrawals, which is why I am still predominantly exiting this asset class.

And this exit is becoming an increasingly slow process, which is due to the fact that hardly any money is coming back and the "easy" part has long since been withdrawn.

Mintos only has a volume for me that comes close to a movie night for 3 people with food for everyone. And of this sum, everything is delayed. I find the fractional bond innovation exciting, but I don't think I'll be getting involved here anymore. I'm now a burnt child when it comes to this platform.

Peerberry has long had the problem that there are never any loans available that I like. Here, the defaults are loans from Russia and Ukraine, now only Ukrainian loans are still outstanding and the pending amount is absolutely negligible. I still remember that it was loans from these two countries that ran like clockwork until the beginning of 2022. How the world can change overnight. If short-term loans with a maximum term of 90 days were available here, I could imagine a future with the platform. But the end of my relationship with the platform is approaching.

EstateGuru impressed me back then. No failures, super transparent, for me it was like a kind of "replacement" for the property I never had. Now I see 50% of my remaining investment in recovery. At least the collection process itself is working here, even if it is very slow. Will better times come again?

Bondora Go&Grow is the saving anchor of the asset class here. I will invest all the money I get from the other platforms here instead. There's nothing else to say about this platform. It just works and does what it's supposed to. 🙃

👉🏼General information:

An increase in my basic rent has been announced for the start of the new year. Fortunately, the amount is very small, so I won't have to make any cuts to my investment.

I'm also hoping for an upward salary adjustment as part of the annual review. Maybe then I'll be able to put €1,000 into my beloved savings plans every month for the first time without having to reinvest the dividends from my fixed net salary.

The current sum of € 920 per month from the fixed net salary is already a dimension that I would never have dared to take on when I started on the stock market after the end of the first coronavirus lockdown.

Of course, as my name suggests, I owe this to my frugal lifestyle. I consume consciously, spend money on things that give me subjective added value and quality of life (e.g. hiking) and leave out other crap. It's a real shame that I wasn't aware of this realization and lifestyle in my twenties in addition to the split-planning strategy. Maybe then I would already be financially free. Having such an opportunity is a real luxury.

Thank you for reading. I'll try to be more concise next time. I look forward to constructive criticism and your thoughts.😉

p.s. see also: https://twitter.com/frugalfreisein/status/1720623355772981331?s=61&t=0p1TbMLyB-LBMWK0gIsGjw

Downsizing my crypto portfolio. I only see teaching money in these tokens at the moment.

How To Uniswap with Hardware Wallet

Or: Crypto is a speculative object but not so far away from being suitable for the masses

Some of you may remember my post about my odyssey to my first NFT. Those who don't remember can read it here: Crypto is speculative and miles away from mass adoption - https://app.getquin.com/activity/QpLqWcSLtc . Recently, I ventured into a new "project". I wanted to trade crypto for crypto, avoiding fees from central exchanges as much as possible. How where what why, and whether I was successful in the end, you read in this post.

What is it all about?

I have been holding Ether for several years on addresses whose private keys are secured via my hardware wallet (Ledger Nano S). Occasionally, there are so-called "AirDrops" on the Ethereum blockchain, where tokens (i.e. other cryptocurrencies that use the Ethereum blockchain) are distributed to certain addresses for free. For example, as a promo action for a new token. For example, a few years ago good 2 LPT, the token of the Livepeer platform, reached me via an airdrop. According to the website, Livepeer is a decentralized video streaming platform. I don't know, I'm not interested in it either. At the beginning, these tokens are usually worthless because they can't be traded anywhere. Most of the time, they stay that way. But they also don't interfere in the wallet, so you just leave them where they are. I recently discovered by accident that LPT can now be traded on various exchanges and definitely has value. At the time, about 10 USD / LPT. Since I had no use for this token, I wanted to exchange it for Ether.

And how does that work?

The usual way would certainly be to send LPT from my hardware wallet to a platform like Binance, exchange it for Ether there, and then send the Ether back to my hardware wallet. Since I only had a total of $20 worth of LPT, I wanted to keep the absolute cost as low as possible. If I had gone through Binance, I would have incurred the following fees:

• Network fees for the transfer from the hardware wallet to Binance.
• Fees for exchanging LPT to USDT on Binance (LPT cannot be exchanged directly to Ether on Binance).
• Fees for exchanging USDT for ETH on Binance
• Fees for "withdrawing" Ether on Binance
• Network fees for transferring from Binance back to my hardware wallet

In the worst case scenario, the fees would consume the entire 20 USD. Fortunately, Uniswap came to mind.

Unis... what?

Uniswap. A DeFi platform on the Ethereum network. In simple terms, a decentralized exchange that allows users to anonymously trade any token on the Ethereum blockchain (including Ether itself) for each other via smart contracts without signing up. Since LPT is a token on the Ethereum blockchain and I want to trade it for Ether, I figured, jackass I thought, give this a try. It can't be worse than back then with the NFT. Or? OR?

The process

So I just typed uniswap into Google and went directly to the project page. https://uniswap.org/ project page. In the upper right corner a pink button with "Launch App" laughed at me. It caught my attention and sounded trustworthy. So just don't think about it, but click on it.

I landed on a very (really very) simple and clear website ( https://app.uniswap.org/#/swap?chain=mainnet ),which gave me the possibility to select two tokens to be exchanged into each other. See screenshot at the end of the post. So simply times LPT in ETH selected. In addition, I found below again a button to connect a wallet. After clicking on it, I was offered to connect to MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, WalletConnect or Fortmatic. I chose WalletConnect and was able to start my Ledger Live app directly from the desktop tab (see screenshot).

All I had to do now was confirm the connection in my Ledger Live app and my ETH and LPT balance were displayed in the Uniswap app. Along with a nice big "swap" button. In addition, the expected network fees and conversion rate were shown. You can also see this in a screenshot at the end of the post. It was surprisingly easy to do.

Alright, let's swap then. I then had to confirm a transaction on my ledger. This was a bit irritating as I was only shown the network fees but not that anything had been sent anywhere or that I was getting anything else in return (see screenshot). So I should be paying fees for what appears to be an empty transaction. Do I do that? Of course I do. No Risk No Fun!

Consequently, the transaction was confirmed by me and the transaction fee was deducted from my Ethereum address. And otherwise? Yes, nothing else happened. I did not receive any Ether and my Uniswap also remained in my account. Now what? Swap again? Pay transaction fees again? Well, wait and see, maybe it takes a bit until the transaction is completely confirmed.

So I waited and googled if I had made a mistake. Thereby I came across this How-To-Article from Uniswap https://help.uniswap.org/en/articles/5391957-how-to-swap-token. It explained to me that when I first wanted to exchange one token for another, I first had to approve that exchange with an "Approve" transaction. So I didn't initiate an exchange with my first click on the swap button, I just gave Uniswap permission to access my Livepeer in my wallet.

Okay, that could have been made more user-friendly. However, death-defyingly, I decided to click the swap button one more time. I had to reconfirm the transactions (empty again, just network charges) on my ledger. This time, however, the LPT left my wallet and I was sent the amount of Ethereum that matched the exchange rate.

Wow, that worked!

Cash check

Compared to the central exchange, I didn't have to pay the exchange fees or the withdrawal fees. In addition, if I wanted to exchange Livepeer again, I would save the network fees for the Approve transaction. This is also relatively easy to track via Etherscan. These are the most recent two transactions (Approve and Multicall) https://etherscan.io/address/0xbe3396b0649167b885bc83f75f00e20924cc433d . Whether / how much spread I paid, however, is not transparent to me.

Conclusion

Of course, there are still minor improvements to be made in terms of user-friendliness. However, considering my odyssey to my first NFT and remembering that we are talking about a very young technology, it was surprisingly easy. Overall, moreover, it was a cool feeling to have conducted a transaction through a decentralized broker without KYC. At the same time, my tokens never had to leave my secured hardware wallet.

I will choose this token swap route whenever possible in the future. Would I invest in Uniswap because of this? No. There are decentralized exchanges a dime a dozen. Moat / unique selling proposition = missing. Moreover, Uniswap is a service on the Ethereum blockchain. Just like Google is a service on the internet. No doubt Google / Alphabet is a good investment. But if it were possible to invest directly in the Internet, that would certainly be an even better investment. In Ethereum, on the other hand, I can invest directly. Therefore, if I am convinced of the technology, I would always prefer an investment in Ethereum over an investment in Uniswap. Of course, there is the possibility to achieve higher returns with Uniswap. But that is nothing more than speculation.

#crypto
#learn
#ethereum
#ledger
#esel

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