Does someone buy EOS every day and then sell it on an exchange for a gain of a few percent? Today I ran the numbers to find out for myself. At the writing of this post, EOS just closed its daily offering of 2,000,000 tokens with 3735 ETH collected. In U.S. Dollars ETH is quoted at $289.12 so $1,079,863 was collected in U.S. dollars for 2 million tokens. That represents a per token price of about .54 USD for the 2 million tokens. The current after market for EOS tokens is quoted at .5555 USD. That suggests the purchasers of today's allotment of 2 million tokens bought them at about a 2.8 % discount. If the buyers flip those tokens back into ETH, after trading fees, they could own their ETH for free in less than two months. Would anything prevent the principals of BlockOne or any hedge fund from doing this? Could it be the real reason for the year long offering? I own EOS and I'm beginning to think I should have waited to buy until next Spring. Am I missing something?
Most days of late you would be chasing the cart downhill and losing money. So you buy (transaction fees) - then you have to pay the claim transaction fees (expensive unless you set low gas like 1 gwei) and then move to Bitfinex and trade for Ethereum (transaction fees) and then back out to Metamask (withdrawal fees) and find that you have less Ether than you started with. There were a few periods in July/August where there was a fair amount of market manipulated arbitrage heisted by a coordinated attempt to spam the Ethereum network to prevent contributions in the last 10 mins (happened at least 3 times that I know of). Nowadays, however, there is practically no room for arbitrage through the token distribution as the price is too low and it only takes one whale to push the price over the market. If the price goes up then there may be an opportunity and I expect we may see the Ethereum spam attack back if it looks as if too many whales are waiting for the last minute.
You may be right but it seemed to me the transaction fees on Kraken were low enough to pull it off.