Bitcoin Forum

So it only moves maybe 10 or 20 cents all day.

Does anyone know what is going on with the market or why it does this?

It happens when Mr Manipulator goes away for a while.

ed?

Don't worry, now that the gold bubble has burst, investors will be flocking to safe haven assets such as bitcoins.

... I almost typed that without bursting into laughter  :D

The last stagnation had an enjoyable rally. Not that this will be the same, but a bit stagnation over endless dropping isn't terrible.

Well, That wall won't let it go down! And, it seems whenever some bids get put down in front of the wall, they just get sold into, holding the price just a few cents above!

Someone just broke and sold 3000 into in down to 5.4. It will take a lot of work to get to 5 though. So we shall see.

They're anticipating we'll be back to 4.6 to 4.8 within the next couple of days.

And that just isn't possible.  It'd break all the long term trends and indicators.

No, the price is tricky.  It does what you least expect of it.  Probably because all the speculators are counting on what they expect of it so it does something else.

I want to know though, what makes it stagnate for days on end?

What ineededausername says, although I don't know about the Manipulator  ;D

When the traders go away, on vacation or crawling somewhere to lick their wounds and quietly reflect on their life, the trend stagnates.

The price is a result of supply and demand, but when there is neither supply nor demand, the price settles on the last traded value and just sits there, waiting for better times, when the traders come back to the market and start doing what they do best - trade.

One thing that does it is that there's a high frequency trading 'bot which trades on several exchanges and, presumably, arbitrages between them when there's an exploitable difference. This has two effects. First, it tends to lock the prices on the different exchanges together. And, indeed, the spreads between exchanges are smaller than they used to be.  Second, it makes the inertia of each market behave as the sum of the inertia in all the markets. Any sudden move in one market that creates a difference between markets big enough to make arbitrage profitable will immediately be picked up and profitably exploited, pulling the markets back together.

http://www.downside.com/image/misc/tradehilltrackingmtgox.png 

You can see this happening on today's charts.  There's Tradehill in black and Mt. Gox in blue, never more than 1.5% apart, even briefly. The difference has to be at least two commissions for a trade to be profitable, so once the spread gets above a threshold, which seems to be about 0.7%, the 'bot should make a trade. That's automated arbitrage in action.

The minor exchanges don't track as closely, indicating that the 'bot doesn't trade on them much, if at all.  Not enough liquidity, most likely.

Believe me, there are way more than one bot. A lot of people are doing arbitrage at MtGox and TradeHill. CampBX and ExchB also have some players...