I wrote a piece about 4 months ago on bitcoin’s price history and my Lawnmower purchase history data and performance. Since bitcoin was still on the tail-end of an 18 month downtrend, and the majority of my Lawnmower trades were initiated when the app was still very much in its infancy feature-wise, I wanted to revisit the topics to do the 2 some justice.

When I wrote my last piece …

… bitcoin’s price history looked like this:

Most recently, like I mentioned, we were at the bottom of a large 18 month downtrend — down from the all-time highs of $1,100+ to what looked like some stability in the $200 — $300 range, settling at about $230.

Since then — from June 13, 2015 to October 20, 2015, bitcoin’s price has done this:

Now let’s check out what happened with my Lawnmower account during this time period, and actually how my Lawnmower account has done since my 2 co-founders and I set up the first beta versions of Lawnmower on our phones almost 8 months ago.

When I wrote my last piece in June, my Lawnmower purchase history looked like this (and was made up of 45 trades in a little over 3 months):

With all of my new trades (including the 18 I’ve made in the last 4 months), my entire Lawnmower purchase history looks like this:

So it obviously looks like I was buying bitcoin much more rapidly in the first half of my Lawnmower account’s life, with purple dots clumped much closer together.

This chart should tell the story on why:

In early June (after testing it internally for a short period), we released 2 pretty big feature updates —slider bars for both a spare change multiplier and threshold:

The multiplier allows you to easily adjust how much you’d like to save over time (automatically multiplying itself with your spare change on each purchase) — customizable from 0.2x to 10.0x. The threshold lets you adjust how frequently you’d like purchases to be initiated (spare change accumulates to this amount before initiating a buy to let you balance timing vs. Coinbase purchase fees — $0.15 for purchases under $15, and 1% for purchases above) — customizable from $4 to $20.

After we put in this functionality, I quickly moved my threshold above $15 to minimize on fees (and thus my purchase frequency has declined, yet for larger amounts each time) — and I usually rotate my multiplier based on how much I’m spending during the week.

Now, let’s look at how these decisions and bitcoin’s price influenced my cost-basis, fees, and overall returns.

In my last piece, my overall cost-basis (weighted average cost I bought all these bitcoin at) on my 45 trades (before fees) looked like this, settling right at $247.83:

With my most recent 18 trades, the chart now looks like this, with my overall pre-fee cost-basis at $250.06:

Before we get to how that correlates to an overall return, let’s see how the cost basis line settled onto $250.06 over time as each trade influenced the average aggregate price I bought in at:

As we can see, despite the crazy price volatility, my overall cost basis remains relatively calm and steady as all my previous purchases weigh in and Lawnmower continues on its automated strategy.

Let’s look at the fees I paid across my aggregate 63 trades:

So as you can see, in the early stages of Lawnmower, before I had my spare change threshold dragged over $15 (and we actually even initiated a few test trades for amounts under $4), I was paying relatively high fees — and very frequently.

In my first 3.3 months of using Lawnmower, I actually ended up paying $6.95 in fees (or an average of 2.06% per trade), versus in the last 4 months where I spent a total of $3.86 in fees (1% on each trade).

In aggregate, using Lawnmower for 7.7 months, I’ve spent $726.45 on 2.862 bitcoin (spending a total of $10.81 on fees, or 1.49% on average per trade — but decreasing as I continue to put in more 1% fee trades).

With bitcoin’s price at $266.36 as of the time writing this, I’m up 6.52% against my before-fee aggregate cost-basis of $250.06, and up 4.94% against my after-fee cost-basis of $253.83.

Looking at only my trades made since my last piece (and me pushing my spare change threshold over $15), my 18 trades for 1.529 bitcoin cost me $389.22 in total (1% each or $3.86 total in fees), putting me up 5.70% against my before-fee aggregate cost-basis of $252.00, and up 4.65% against my after-fee aggregate cost-basis of $254.52.

Thanks for reading and check out Lawnmower on both iOS & Android if you want to join me in stacking bitcoin :)

Alex Sunnarborg

** We’ve even got a new promo going — all new users new to Lawnmower (and Coinbase) get $5 free just for signing up **