Who shall I delegate my SP to?

I'm a firm believer of supporting people who have helped me to grow on Steemit, and where possible to support other quality content creators. That's why I prefer to hold the majority of my SP. That's not to say I don't delegate any of my SP out, but I try to limit it around 30% which still leaves me with a respectable 16 cent upvote today.

My biggest delegation is 1250 SP to @silvergoldbotty. Recently I've been looking at the upvotes from them, in the past few days I get about 33 - 34 cents. When I post from @busy, their upvote is slightly higher than @silvergoldbotty with no delegation at all! And when I compare that to @qurator, I delegate 100 SP and get 10 to 11 cents upvote. That got me thinking, am I getting the best return on my delegation?

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I started to do a little digging around today looking at various places where I know people delegate to, and quickly pulled some data based on how much people have delegated and the returns they get. This is no more than a data gathering excercise, and a snapshot of the returns they received in the past few days. I haven't looked into the details of each of the delegatees at all. This is what I did:

1. I looked at at least three delegators who delegated different levels of SP for every delegatee
2. where possible I choose accounts who delegated recently so the results wouldn't be skewed with any early bird bonus etc
3. SBD to Steem conversion assume 0.47
4. all returns are from the past week
5. where there are fluctuations in the daily dividends, I've taken the 3 day average where possible
6. weekly dividends are simply divided by 7 to get a daily return
7. I assume my @silverbottygold upvote is worth 0.34 /0.47 x 75% = 0.5426 SP after curation
8. finally, I took the daily SP return for each of my finding and extrapolated it to 1250 SP so I can compare it with the 0.5426 return I get from @silvergoldbotty

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So what did I find out? Let's take a look at those who does a weekly payout first. I looked at @steemhunt, @actifit, @dlike and @accelerator.

The returns for @steemhunt and @dlike are consistent for all three users, and when extrapolated to 1250 SP delegation gives 0.09 and 0.12 Steem per day respectively. For @actifit the returns range from 0.048 to 0.012 which seems to indicate the returns depends on how much you delegate. So if I were to delegate 1250 SP to @actifit, I reckon I'd get around 0.08 SP per day. The clear winner from my analysis is @accelerator where the daily return is 0.6 SP per day. However, one thing that needs to be noted is that I believe all the other three dApps offer some form of tokens on top of the SP and SBD returns. I haven't looked at how much the tokens are worth and whether they are worth 5x the SP and SBD to bring them on par with @accelerator. Right now, I guess not? The future, who knows?

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Next I looked at delegations to some bid bots that pays a daily return. Love them or hate them, they're not going away.

There isn't a massive difference between the returns from the bidbots. @oceanwhale is the lowest from the four that I looked at and it seems the return may be based on the delegation amount. The next is @therising, 0.57 SP which is a bit better than my delegation to @silvergoldbotty. Next is @ocdb, they're the only bot I use and they return all profits to delegators. The daily return is between 0.64 to 0.66SP. And finally @smartsteem has over 0.6 SP return per day as well. However, the range is quite big and I haven't had time to look further into it.

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And finally I looked at a few non bid bot delegatees.

According to @share2steem delegators get up to 25% APR, this is a lot more than what the three delegators are geting these couple of days. I've never used @share2steem before and I haven't had time to fully understand their model and how they achieve 25% APR yet. @wherein has created a lot of hype recently and attracted a lot of investors within a short period of time. Their return isn't great, around 0.15SP per day, but they also upvote you. This depends on how much you delegate, these levels I've shown get between 3% to 8% which is worth roughly $0.13 to $0.32. The last delegatee I looked at is @justyy a witness, and one of if not the longest running delegation service within the Chinese community. There are step returns at 350 SP and 600SP and above. I would net 0.34 SP per day with 1250 delegation. You also get complimentary upvotes which are dependant on a number of factors including delegated SP, reputation, your support to him as a witness etc.

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CAVEATS
I pulled this together in a spare afternoon by just snooping around people's account so this is by no means a detailed analysis of who offers the best return for your delegation. It's just some high level data gathering and a snapshot of the returns this week. There could be (but I hope not) errors in my workings. There are probably other factors which I haven't covered like the value of tokens and non SBD/Steem return that doesn't appear in ones wallet. I'm aware there are some small inconsistencies in my findings, but nothing in my opinion that would sway the findings too much. Last and not the least, this is a just a small selection of options, there are many many more out there which I'm not aware of or haven't looked at today.

If you're aware of any other good delegation opportunities, or have any comments on the above, drop me a comment. Thanks.

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