I have been collecting the price feed, SBD exchange rate, and http://www.steemdollar.com/ ticker at various times over the past few days. I wanted to see how often a hypothetical 1,000 SBD conversion would have produced more value than the exchanges were offering. I was expecting pretty mixed results, but they were quite promising.
Of the 6 data points that I sampled, two would have resulted in breaking even or slightly losing. The other four were clearly profitable. Of those four, one showed a substantial gain over the market price.
As a frame of reference, the Poloniex chart of the last week shows some volatility but no distinct trend in either direction. The market has been pretty favorable for conversions, given that there has been no steep decline in price.
Here we see that the value of the Steem we would get back from a conversion that finalizes at this time would be greater than the market is offering.
We can verify it by looking at the internal market:
It checks out!
