Bid based bots for ROI: Good or bad idea?

A few days ago, @ilyastar wrote an interesting article about the appropriate use of bots. One part of that article that really caught my attention was about using bots for Return of Investment (ROI). According to the author, its actually a pretty stupid idea to expect bots to give you a good return of investment.

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While I have used bots quite often myself (mostly to increase my reputation) I actually agree with the author. For example, while by looking at the steembottracker site, you might be thinking that you could be getting a good ROI from a certain bot, your expectations might fall short due to the following reasons.

1. Upvote requests coming in the last seconds of a round

I am pretty sure some people are using programs that can automatically detect when to get a vote by looking at the existing bids. Such programs could be waiting for a bot's bid round to end, and transfer money to it just a few seconds before the round ends. But guess what, if several people are using such kind of programs, all of them would be transferring money at almost the same time (towards the end of the round that is), thus killing your bid and therefore giving you a bad ROI.

2. Some bots just hang at 100%

So, the round ended with you expecting a good ROI, but then comes the shock that the bot has hanged at 100% and is still allowing more bids. In the end, you get a really bad ROI. However, only few bots show such kind of dishonesty.

3. Many people don't use the bot tracker program

They just transfer money at random time without looking at the bids. For example, I took screenshots from the details shown in the steembottracker site for two bots. The first one was hanging at 100%, and the second one still had 15 minutes to go for the round to end. You can see that the ROI for the first bot is horrible at -57.11%, while ROI for the second bot is already significantly in negative despite 15 minutes to go for its round to end. Shocking, isn't it?

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4. Pending rewards decrease with decrease in value of STEEM

As you would have noticed, the value of your pending rewards keep on changing. This is because those values depend upon the average value of STEEM for the last 3.5 days. So, while at the time you got the vote, you could be having a good ROI, that ROI would not be exactly the same when you eventually get rewards for that post. You might get lucky too, if the value of STEEM increases. However, this is obviously a gamble.

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I hope you liked reading this article, and I would love to read your opinions on bid-based bots.