Liquidity pools can be confusing

I like to think that I am well versed in how liquidity pools work on Tribaldex. I also like to think that I know a little about hive-engine, arbitrage and other financial stuff on Hive.

But I will admit that sometimes things don't work as I think they should.

Mostly I'm thinking about the GLD : Swap.LTC pool

When I created the pool I placed exactly enough GLD and Swap.LTC in it to make sure that GLD had a price of $0.01 HBD. Essentially it is a HBD penny. It sat that way for a while. However, I knew that if LTC went up or down the overall value of the pool would go up or down and I had no control over that whatsoever. My idea was simple. If the value went up I would sell GLD into the pool and if the value went down I would sell LTC into the pool.

Except I put in LTC and GLD went down... Huh? Why?

Then I went to the pool this morning and the GLD coin was down to 0.007 cents? 30% under what I consider its PEG. Now holders can still exchange for 100:1 through my website/bot but I thought... Wow. LTC must have tanked for the GLD to go down that far. Except LTC went up.

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Ok. To me that makes no sense

Here are the actual pool numbers

GLD Value : $0.00827 <-- My goal is $0.01
Swap.LTC : $49.339 <-- Hmm... that looks off.

I took a look at the price of LTC through Google and I got this

Doing my own math.

The pool has 8.168 swap.LTC in it.
Each should be worth $55.67
Total Value: $454.65

The pool has 44637 GLD tokens if valued at $0.01
Total Value: $446.37

Yes I like that valuation.

But just to look at it from a "cashout" perspective.

A "Sell" order on Tribaldex

500 GLD gets 0.09025 LTC

$55.67 / LTC * 0.09025 LTC = $ 5.02

Since I want 500 GLD to be worth $5.02 I'm quite happy with someone getting 5.02 in value from their LTC.

In that way the value is still there. **But why does Tribaldex only value the LTC at 49.34

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It makes little sense to me but....

I went to look at the HIVE to Swap.LTC conversion.

Just for fun I looked at how much SWAP.LTC I would get for 100 HIVE

$ 55.67 / LTC * 0.1317 LTC = $7.33 for those 100 HIVE

And how much does PeakD say HIVE at worth right now?

So that matches also

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Which leaves me confused

Really confused.

I mean if I look at this pool for swap.hive/swap.ltc it shows the LTC value at $42.01???

But...but....but.... I don't get it

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Final thoughts?

I just thought I would share this. Not because I can make sense of it but rather because I can't.

If I was to guess I would say that the tribaldex site uses up to the minute pricing and arbitrage to make sure that things buy and sell for the right amount. That's why I can sell GLD and get the correct amount of LTC. That's why I can sell HIVE and get the right amount of LTC. Sure there is slippage but that's shown right in the buy and sell page.

I have a feeling that the data on the pool is updated less frequently than the data for the trades. In that way when I look at the liquidity pool holdings they show me old data on the value of each token in HBD.

Or I could be missing something altogether

As always I'll keep watching and see if I can figure out this unsolved mystery but... For now I've said my peace about it. If someone reads this and knows better than I do? I'd love a comment.

Thanks.

Just as a final add on.

I ran this through an AI which tells me that the values are correct through bots and arbitrage but the pool data is internally correct from the values it uses but not reflected in real world data.

That seems a little fishy to me but.. maybe it makes sense and my brain doesn't get it... yet I'll do more thinking :)