Bitcoin Forum

Ok so I had entered a long position recently at a good place, with my stop loss order set just below the prior low at 4.21.  I set my orders to stop out half my position at 4.17 and the other half at 3.97.

As you imagine my stop triggers were hit and Bitcoinica started the arduous process of selling off my position, 50 bitcoins at a time, with about a 15 second delay between each 50 bitcoin sale.  Not ideal, but hey what can happen in 15 seconds?  Apparently everyone else had their sell stops in the same place as me.

Very quickly the price fell through 3.97 and triggered my second stop order, while the first one was still in the long slow process of selling off my position.  So now I have 2 market orders selling for me, trying to share the 15 second lag time.

Then at 3.91 my account was force liquidated.  ok fine, just get me out, I'm done.  But oh no, Zhou Tong is not done with me yet!  This is when the real fun begins.

After liquidation, the system kept processing my sell stop orders, 50 bitcoins at a time, establishing me a new net-short position.  I ended up short a large number of bitcoins at an average entry of 3.90.  This is never what I intended, so I immediately issued a buy order to flatten out my position.

Again, the painstakingly slow 50 BTC at a time, long delay process begins, and I cover my shorts at 4.40.

So my questions are as follows:

1.  Why is there such a long delay between 50 BTC executions?  Average delay is 15 seconds.  This should be more like 15 milliseconds on any decent trading platform.

2.  Why were my outstanding orders not cancelled after the forced liquidation?

3.  Did I at least make $0.01 interest on holding this short position for a few minutes?

If you got forced liquidated, how did you still have funds to process sell orders?

Did you add funds back in?

Leverage is bad.

heh, one needs to be zhoutongued really hard before realizing to only risk pocket change with that site.


quite a clever system if you asked me -- creates its own liquidity (getting you to go short even after an extreme move like that).

Rough... hopefully Zhoutong addresses this.

I think the good way to fix it, is to have another type of order that would say "Liquidate THAT position at certain price move". In that case force liquidation of the position will also cancel the order.

Bit-goxed....