Bitcoin Forum

I am out of my Bitcoin position for now, although I am not sure that I would go as far as to declare myself intermediate bearish as of yet. However, here are some observations that I have made.

The first is well documented. It is the maxed out state of Bitfinex leveraged longs. As can be seen, we hit an ATH at around 24 million USD being loaned out to leveraged longs. At the start of the ramp up, as you can see, their was around 16 million USD on loan to leveraged Bitcoin traders on Bitfinex. An increase of around 8 million, accounts for some 15K BTC being held in long positions, whilst paying fairly high rates of interest out on a daily basis. We can see that since the $683 top on June 2nd, the level of USD swaps as generally continued to rise, although the BTC price has not.

http://i61.tinypic.com/28ji5v6.png




The screenshot below shows the current downward resistance trendline of the 'bullish' pennant formation we are currently in:

http://i59.tinypic.com/8z0dqb.png

I recommend that you all get over to Bitcoinwisdom (or indeed Trading view, no matter) and draw this line on the chart for yourselves. Once you have done that zoom out the chart a bit and see what other points it connects with.

Once you have done that, you will see that this line is a perfect fit with the Nov 30th, and the Dec 4th ATHs!

So. We have a maxed out leveraged situation on Bitfinex, the maxing out of which has no doubt greatly contributed to the recent Bitcoin ramp (the increase accounts for ~15K BTC, not of volume, but being held in long positions), and has also continued to increase for the past week (up until today), although the Bitcoin price has decreased and we have pennant downtrend that just happens to also be a tangent to both points of the double top at the end of 2013!

Hmmm....  :-\

Even if there is still big money sitting on sidelines looking to take large Bitcoin positions at this point in time, they will take one look at this leveraged long situation and rubbing their hands with glee at thought of how much they could lower their entry points into the market by squeezing these longs who must fold their hands if the market does not rise and even more so if the market starts turning against them. Furthermore, no large quantity of capital is going to enter the market at these prices when their is so much margin trade hanging around looking to cash out for profits. After all, that is what margin traders do. Cash out, as opposed to buying a big bunch of an asset, storing it away and forgetting about it.

If I understood better about bitfinex, I would bet that it would go higher (in the up coming weeks).
You do bring some legit observations about the bearish issue (and I did expect 700 for this week already since it hit 680 last week).

Its barely getting 650. Lets see what happens mid to end week.

Market is feeling rather heavy. That is why I exited my position at small loss.....for the nth time in the past phucking week, thus largely devouring the profits I made on the way up (again, less than half of what I could have made if I wasn't a shit trader)

Houbi and Stamp lead. So Bitfinex being over extended is not a market mover ,IMO.

Plus I still can't wrap my head around the fact that Finex never has less than 15 million in longs at crazy interest rates. It has never made sense to me.

So you will have noticed how Bitfinex seemed to want to take off earlier, Huobi seemed to follow, but how Bistamp (no leverage and 100% real volume) stayed put?

Bitfinex do also have a system in place for routing trades through Bitstamp.....so pretty weird how they never bit into Bitstamps Ask wall, but instead let traders ramp up the price on their own thin books.......but then, Bitfinex are crooks, and that was probably just a spot of friendly exchange insider short stop loss farming.

15K BTC held in leveraged long positions undeniably has an effect on the market, no matter what exchange it is on so long as lines of inter exchange arbitrage are open to someone,

The price is tanking a little, if it falls it will go not below than 600, and then probably next weekend we will have the 700s

Hmm... time to sell?

I very much agree with your position on leveraged longs. ATH in longs, at this price level and movement, and considering (from my amateur observation of BFX and Stamp on Wisdom) much of this rise on Stamp was push up by BFX market buys....makes me nervous. I still see some people mentioning "short squeeze" here and there. I think the shorts have been squeezed. And if the bullish momentum doesn't start soon, these longs risk feeling the squeeze. (And the books are scary thin for the amount of longs too)

It seems to me that all of you, guys, are not aware of this: "Total sum of active swaps"=!"Total sum of active leveraged positions". You can take the swap, keep it and not use it in a trade, and THERE ARE people who actually doing so (for example, they find it profitable to keep cheap swap for the long time being ready to trade when the time comes, instead of taking expensive swap at the time of trade). There are 22,8 MUsd active swaps on bitfinex now, which is equal to 35 kBTC at current price, and 4400 active BTC swaps, which is 8 times less. But indicator here https://www.bitfinex.com/pages/stats shows us that long positions are only about less then twice of short positions.

You're almost as good as Veronica  :)

I find the similarity with the first days of February interesting.

You're playing with fire Mat.. you know you're a shit trader but you're still trying to trade? That spells trouble. You should have kept those coins in cold storage like you first intended to do. Maybe people have been wanting USD on Bitfinex to be prepared for an expected breakout to the upside soon and haven't actually taken their leveraged long position yet? You don't know how much of those $8M increase in USD swaps are actually stuck in leveraged longs right now. Anyway I wouldn't base my entire analysis and position on what's happening on Bitfinex, and I doubt the manipulating whales you fear so much do either. Perhaps they were just waiting for you to close your longs because they see your posts here and like to laugh at you foaming at the mouth when the price doesn't go your way. :P

Another bearish observation is that btc-e is still adhering to a descending triangle:

https://i.imgur.com/YSjqgxJ.jpg

Perhaps the manipulators decided to fool people by breaking it on bitstamp and china, but keeping it on btc-e.  :P

Good luck, mate. Set an alarm for the night if you can, in case there's a sudden swing upwards, and if the drop you're expecting happens, don't get too greedy. Take a look at likely fib levels, maybe daily BB, and take a profit in BTC if you get the chance.

Maybe more principally, make up your mind what kind of trading you want to do: trading for (moderate) USD gains, and securing them as soon as possible? Then selling now probably wasn't a terrible choice actually. Or trying to maximize your profits over a longer period? Then I think you need to get used to letting profits ride a bit longer. But fuck this, don't know why I'm lecturing. You seem to know what you're doing, by and large.

He bought those coins at $660, so he cemented a net loss. I think it's always a terrible choice to start trading again when you know and admit to yourself you are completely crap at it. It just makes no sense to me at all. Considering Mat wasn't even able to hold his coins in cold storage for a week I doubt he will be able to when he gets lucky to get in lower. Something will happen to shake him out of his position again, you can pretty much bet on it.

Yep many small losses, many small gains, and lots of nerve cells later he'll come out where he started, in usd terms, if lucky, and the question is why even bother?

Learn to cuss properly mat. And stop throwing money at something you are terrible at. If you can't trade and can't even hold you are better off getting out completely. I suspect you would actually enjoy having another sob story to tell in a few years.

I just meant that, right this moment, I see a slightly higher chance for a price drop than for a price increase, though I believe the upside potential to be a lot higher than the downside potential, so I'm personally not tempted to sell. So in that sense, if he'd be disciplined enough to trade like that, it might make sense to be in fiat now to make a quick buck during a drop. But agreed on the rest. Mat kind of seems to have some decent intuition for the market. He just completely lacks trading discipline and emotional control, from what I can tell.

It is perfectly reasonable to think that we will falter at this point. Past patterns also point to this. It's just a question of how much before the return upwards.

For what it's worth, Mat, from one shit trader to another, I've been experimenting with leveraged longs and also closed my position last night at a loss, although I have a small overall net profit so far since the start of this uptrend.

I notice also that during the night (for me) or rather the very early morning, that both Huobi and Bitfinex broke to the upside on strong volume. But Bitstamp, didn't get out the $650s. The break out on Bitfinex coincides with yet further ATHs on the USD swap rates....could of course be yet more short stop loss farming by the rats who operate the exchange with access to the required inside information.

As I said before, Bitfinex wants to go up, Huobi wants to go up. But Bitstamp just will not budge which means that the market will not budge. Peculiar.


and I resolved to wait on getting some kind of strong intuitive feel on the market before exiting my position.....but too many 'facts' were staring me in the face to ignore and I have to let logic thinking guide my decisions to some extent. So I decided to cement some losses. I got up this morning and saw Bitcoin $10 higher than what I sold at (on Stamp), which seems to be as high as it is getting for now.....pffft....I really don't know what is coming next......forces at work operating through Huobi and Bitfinex that definitely want market to go higher, but forces at work on Stamp aint having it. Why is this? Because Huobi and Bitfinex both do leverage and probably also completely fake volume and Stamp does not? If there are whales on the other exchange gladly willing to bid Bitcoin up on other exchanges why aren't they also doing it on Stamp? Could it just be insider short stop loss farming or something even more nefarious?

the Mat the cat contrarian indicator has switched! buy buy buy buy!

How sure are you that you are interpreting this particular set of 'facts' correctly? How sure ought you to be to have exited your HODL strategy? I would say you need to be pretty damn sure. More sure, in fact, than you are that HODL will work for the pure HODLers.

I would like to see you test your ability to recognize actionable 'facts.' Every time you see what you consider to be a clear signal in the market, write it down as a prediction that is clear enough that a computer could decide the truth or falsehood (eg, "the price on stamp will drop to xxx between now and xxx," something like that). Write down the date and time of your prediction. Also, rate how sure you are of yourself. Do this whether or not you actually make a trade on it. Heck, even post your predictions here as an "official Mat the Cat Prediction." After, let's say, 20 such predictions, you will calculate a batting average. That way, next time you are trying to decide whether to take your coins out of cold storage, you can remind yourself what your batting average is.

(Disclaimer: always take unsolicited advice with a grain of salt  ::) )

Good.  Matt has flipped back bearish.  Time for a rally.

Yes when he admitted he only held ~13 btc I remember thinking , "why bother?".

Mat you are churning in and out of btc so often you are bound to lose. You must recognise that where the price goes from here short term is simply a guess, a toss of a coin, which incidentally you just have to react to.

The market cannot be predicted with a chart or TA by you in a way which will deliver consistent returns or more importantly beat a buy and hold position.

Just imagine how more productively you could have spent your time if you had bought, held and simply .. waited for time to pass!

If I were you I would buy back in, wait a year for btc to do its thing, then play wall st trader with a fraction of your gains. Yes it is still gambling that the bull market will continue, but you must have a a belief in bitcoin to still be here right?

Either way keep us informed ;)

Thinking that you can glean anything about the future bitcoin price based off information that all market participants can see (order book, number of swaps, etc) is a mistake.

As you well know, reading markets is as much of an art form as a science. Anyone can cherry pick 'facts' to suit his own emotional bias. So perhaps the real battle is learning to calibrate ones tendencies for emotional bias. By announcing 'MatTheCat predicts', I am emotionally investing in a certain course of market action which may serve me up to a point, but I will more likely than not be required to change my stance as and when the market demands, but.....

MatTheCat predicts!

Despite the textbook bullish pennant, Bitcoin is more likely to break down before it can break out due to heavy selling pressure that seems to be operating primarily through Bitstamp. I am looking in the first instance for a retest of the $620 range and then we will see where we are and whether Bitcoin wants to rise or correct further down to say $580. In the case that I am totally wrong, then should Bitcoin break above the new long term downtrend resistance line currently at $665 (dating back to Nov 2013), and on strong volume, than that would be a time to go long.


That is just under $10K. I have already lost around $5K on a short trade I decided to 'Hodl' on knowing that the market would eventually come back to me. The market eventually did come back to my short-sell point (only just), but my nerve caved-in way before then at what turned out to be around $35 from the top of the market. That experience hurt a lot. The 'paltry' $5K certainly fucking mattered and I shall never take such a gung-ho and/or negligent approach to trading ever again.

Right now, most people around here are of the opinion that another large move up is coming around the mountain and I would tend to agree with them at this point in time. However, there is also a convincing bearish case that suggests we have just had a Wave B of a greater Wave 4 correction from the November ATH. If that turns out to be the case, which it might, then I don't want to be bag holding from the top of the market. I should still be holding my position from $460, but I thought I could be smart and take profits and buy back in on a correction that never quite materialised. Since then it has been a cagey game of in and out for me. Next time I catch a clear winning tide, I shall know to get the Bitcoins the fuck off the exchange and into some offline wallet before I start drawing lines on chart and go getting 'smart' ideas. But until then, I have decided that my risk tolerance is such that I will not sit back and hold if I am convinced that there is a strong chance that the market is going to move against me in the near future. If I cement small losses doing this and am forced to buy back in at a higher price on break out, then so be it. That is my new policy.

Problem is you are looking at things the wrong way. You want fiat. This is a mistake. Fiat doesn't matter, the total number of coins once we eventually hit whatever high number matters. Thus, the goal should be to accumulate coins and to never risk them. Don't spend more bitcoins than you are willing to lose.

This is very true. It's true of us all (and not just wrt investing -- life in general!) Many people recognize this in others but we all find it inherently difficult to recognize it in ourselves. Just recognizing it will often put you ahead of the game! (I am speaking in very general terms here.)


Yes. This is a hugely important, difficult battle! Requires discipline. Discipline is what I rarely see in those who post about TA. Their predictions are imprecise and posed in a manner such that whatever happens, they can say "yeah I predicted that." Very often, a long winded post will boil down to this:

"If the price drops, then [insert fancy TA terminology] and it will drop some more. But if the price goes up, then [insert some more fancy TA terminology] it will go up some more." The result is that the person ends up chasing the market: all too often, buying AFTER the rise, selling AFTER the fall.

Solution: make your predictions specific, unambiguous. The more you discipline yourself along these lines, the better.

If the market goes from 660 straight up to 4000, or 660 to 460 and then to 4000, or hell: 660 to 50 in a flash crash and then to 4000, doesn't matter to me. I'm not going to kick myself for failing to predict a crash.

The only way to win at this game is to have more information that the ones you're playing against. When you HODL, you win because you are playing against the large chunk of humanity who have not yet focused their attention on bitcoin. They're going to buy one day, and you and I know it, but they don't. We're not necessarily smarter than they are, we just got here first. When you play the short-term fluctuations, you are playing against people who have immersed themselves in all publicly available information on bitcoin, and may even be privy to information that the rest of us don't have. The odds are that you and I can't beat them!

I'm fairly sure that Mat is not sure of the HODL strategy in the slightest.

Yes that should be my advice from now on :) Instead of "don't risk fiat which you are not prepared to lose", smarter advice would be "don't risk not owning bitcoins which you can own today".

Dunno about that.

I posted on here some TA, which also happened to be the TA that I was adhering to at the time. I also stated that I favoured a bearish outcome in that the price would break beneath the support other than above the resistance. Either way I had IF [insert fancy TA terminology] Then [insert fancy TA terminology] for both possible outcome. In the end, the market broke the long term resistance on strong volume after a low volume fake out of the support line. Despite thinking that the market would go further down, I knew that I had to jump in on the retest and got in at $460. As sweetly timed as I ever have timed Bitcoin......pity my profit taking and correction catching efforts never went so well.

You have made my point perfectly. Your trade was based on the logic: if the price goes up [above the resistance line] then it will go up some more. In this particular instance you were right, but I am sure there are similar examples where you lost on the trade.

Yeah....if you just go drawing lines on any old bunch of spikes or dips then go saying if X happens then do this, but if Y happens then do that, you will likely be wrong a hell of a lot. But this one was looking at the bigger picture using support trendline that dated as far back as Jan 2013 and a resistance that went back to January and I still admit that I was wrong in that I thought the market would go down a bit more, but never placed any bets until the confirmation of market intent was made. Sure, the market still could have double backed on me, but by correctly identifying these patterns and potential turning points, the trader is greatly increasing his chances of making a good trade.

Eh. I'd cut Mat some slack. He had the right intuition all throughout the bear market, when a lot of bulls were still (or: again, and again) in denial. And despite what some people like to say, intuition is a big part of trading profitably.

My advice: develop some basic trading system that works for you, filter out everything that is not part of that system, and see if he can make it work better than his previous trading attempts.

Yeah, that's great. But if what I'm reading lately is correct, that he has 13 coins and lost $5k trying to trade, that means that instead of having twice as many as me he instead has slightly more. How long until I'm ahead, being in denial all the way down and buying a bit every month?

Yes, you are looking at the bigger picture. And of course, looking at the bigger picture is a good thing. But you're still just making my point. All you have done in the above paragraph is to flesh out the [insert fancy TA terminology] just a little bit. And I'm sure you could flesh it out some more. But it still boils down to:
"[Lots of TA analysis of the bigger picture, and the smaller picture, and the in between picture, coupled with my intuition], oh look, the market just went up! Given my aforementioned analysis, I am going to buy now."


I won't deny that.


I'm not so sure that bulls / HODLers are in denial. It's just that they are much more focused on the long term trajectory (years) than on the medium or short term trajectories (months, days). In fact, most bulls are already predicting the NEXT crash, after the impending bubble.

Fantastic point.

Is a man's merit measured by the number of Bitcoins he has?

I have had various amounts of capital in and out of the exchanges. Been practically 'all in' at some points aside from what I have in precious metals. I remember sitting on around 26 BTC that were bought in $1000 range and having decided that I was gonna sell these ones for a small loss. I was told that I would be crying when I bought back in at $1300. I am glad I never listened to piramida. You would have no doubt told me the same thing. So it isn't like I have whittled away my stack and I only have 13.5 BTC remaining. I have been taking money out and spending it to live of, and also just blowing it, especially at the start when thousands were coming in that seemed like money for nothing......when I discovered leveraged trading, is when things started to go not so well and I started finding out the things about my personality that make me a lousy trader. I have therefore resolved not to use leverage and also not to short which is counter intuitive......hard to get accustomed to feeling baddd about the market actually being a good thing.

Agreed! Many people here and more so in the future, will never own a full Bitcoin.
Besides, 10% is 10% whether it's of 1,000,000 BTC or .01 BTC. The gross profit will be smaller, but you still gain 10% on what you were willing to invest. You don't have to be a whale for trading to make sense.

No but his wealth is. If you are here for some other reason then disregard.

Hold the coins you own now, Mat; don't sell them.
Buy more if you like,  if you can do so knowing you won't have to liquidate in order to meet living expenses.
Chill. :)

Agreed. Well put.

Bitfinex available USD swaps will rapidly increase so long as the rate is above 0.2%/day.  And quite possibly they'll rapidly increase with a 0.15%/day swap rate.  If high swap rates are maintained, I'd expect the USD available swap to increase by (a very rough guess) 5-20%/week.

Between Nov 1 and Dec 1, 2013 - the swaps doubled from $2.4 to $5 million.  And then they doubled again by Jan 1 (from 5 to 12.5 million).  And by February 1 it hit 18 million.

I think it'd take a swap rate of under 0.10% to cause a decline in total available swaps.

Bitfinex supply of swap has been increasing at a rate faster than the price of Bitcoin and this is bullish.

great Point !

Hope no one here expects a comment to be taken serious that contains the word "HODL".^{mine included}

Oh HODL, oh HODL, have I made a match for you...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=59Hj7bp38f8#t=111

What PERMA BEAR was right in a bear market ...wow

He was telling peopel to short at ~480 FFS

Still crapping on about sub 300 prices up until 550+

Yeah a broken clock is right twice a day ...good luck to him

Locking a loss from 660 ....is not a good move ..we may be in this 600-700 consolidation zone for the next 6 weeks... who cares the market says btc is XXX for now

Lets consolidate ....to say we are going back down 500..400 prices I dont see it... to just say it because we are having a pause and all the bears are no coming out with doom and gloom its a joke

You need just as much energy to go down as u do up  :P

Some great info in this thread! While a short term correction is definitely possible, I firmly believe that later this year truckloads of VC and wall street money will come pouring into BTC and the price will be back in the 4 digits. When that happens, it won't really matter whether you got in at a $50-$100 per BTC discount  ;D

No matter how much it grows the one buying with discount will have about 10% more.

By they way - I think it will drop much more than that.

Looks like we were right to close our long positions Mat!

Although I am still holding my Bitcoin - just glad I'm not still holding on to that leveraged long.

yeah sort of. if you're here talking about trading, your either trading to accumulate more coins for free, or as you put it, just getting free money and blowing it on nothing. i would say the men trying to build their store of coins have infinitely more merit than the guys who are just blowing their profits. trust me i know where you're coming from i did the same things last year. id sell around 300$ thinking it couldn't stay above ATH for long, then be forced to buy back in at 450, when it finally started dropping i got in around 600 and it kept going down. i lost a third the value of my coins, so i had a choice; cement my losses, or just wait for history to play its course. now my old coins are profiting again and i grabbed more around the bottom. id say my strategy holds significantly more merit than your strategy of try and predict a move, fail, and panic sell at a loss just to buy in higher.

OP can buy back he received his news (Expedia).

Yep so far so good. Still to see how my re-buys pan out in relation to the price action though (None of my rebuys have been triggered yet).

You were long on Bitfinex I presume?

A very peculiar price decoupling thing going on recently. Bitfinex has been wanting to take off as has Huobi, but Bitstamp  isn't buying into it. Selling pressure on Bitstamp is pushing the market down, even though the volume on Bitfinex is about double what it is on Bitstamp and volume on Huobi is multiple times larger. With Bitstamp currently at $631, and Bitfinex, at  $647, why isn't somebody taking advantage of the arbitrage on offer? Is this the beginning of another Gox situation where the fake volume exchanges race way of ahead of the real volume exchange? (have I mentioned before that I don't trust Bitfinex?). Are there issues with moving fiat out of Bitfinex?

Most peculiar is that Bitstamp (trustworthy, reliable) has reached parity with BTC-e (oo-er). This makes me think that there is a battle going on between leveraged traders and undiluted capital. If traders on Bitfinex think that Bitcoin is worth between $15-$20 more than it is going for on Bitstamp, then why aren't they snapping up those 'cheap' coins on Bitstamp? Because Bitstamp don't do no leverage and Bitfinex traders are already maxed out? Because Bitfinex's version of Willy bot is holding up the price there? Also, Bitfinex route some of their orders through Bitstamp for liquidity, yet as the prices indicate, this seems to be a selective process. Why is it selective and why aren't Bitfinex buying up cheaper Bitstamp coins to fill their own customers orders?

continue reporting (or supposing) about Bitstamp and bitfinex. Interesting

Au contraire, mon frere. Around here, HODL is a very serious ... TRADITION!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRdfX7ut8gw

Yes.... and hold.

Selling now would be like selling last August when the price was hovering in the 100-140 range and some fools were still clinging to their futile hopes of sub-$100 coins. Some particularly deluded people even talked about 30-40 just as some today dream of sub-$400.

We all know what happened last fall. This summer should be fun.

SAR sell signal
https://twitter.com/cryptoinvestor/status/476037630820618240

Remember what happened last time when the daily SAR said sell?

https://i.imgur.com/3nXcMJc.png

Well, I would never use SAR on its own for buy/sell signals. But I will say, give me a month of sideways here, and I will go long. Not sure at this point...

This is strange, and yeah the spread is now $15 to $20 over stamp but bitstamp is at parity with btc-e

donot depend on the sar because it is a repainting indicator.No indicator can give you accuracy slways analyze fundamental news before taking any trade

Me neither. That's the point. Daily SAR is quite lagging to begin with, and depending on the larger context, it will produce a signal that is going to cost you. So I'd caution anyone selling (or buying for that matter) just because some guy tweeted "SAR down/up".

I use a bunch of indicators. Ichimoku, MFL, EMA, DMI and SAR. A high-crossing MFL in combination with SAR sell is a good sign to jump out of the train. I'm short since 650-660 USD (Bitfinex). And you?

What about me? Oh, I get it...

Yeah, I personally don't re-post one line tweets saying "sell nao".

This one came pretty good.....a bit too fucking good and if it doesn't stop soon, it might turn pretty bad. Had buy-in tranches from $600 right down to $560, but all this was happening whilst world cup was on, otherwise I would have been in position to place my buy-ins a bit better.

Big bad bear is operating on Stamp as well, forcing all the leveraged longs out their positions on other exchanges, at least to a certain extent. Built a nice big 1K wall at $575 which is around $10 beneath my average buy-in price.....

.....certainly glad I exited my $660 position though as I would be sweating blood right now. Worse than that. I would have done a Veronica for sure.

You may have caught close to the bottom of the knife just perfectly, Mat. Already rebounding. My analysis (I am reposting from rpietila's thread) is that the 80-point drop from 630 to 550 on stamp (a 12% drop) was panic selling as an overreaction to news of the Silk Road selloff.

Here's why I calculate it to be an overreaction: According to http://bitcoinwatch.com/, the volume of BTC traded over the past 24 hours on all exchanges is somewhere around 150,000 btc. (Someone pls verify I'm reading the chart correctly ... ) Compare that to 30,000 btc that the US Marshals Service is going to selloff. Are they going to dump it on a single exchange over the next 10 seconds? No. They are giving us a 19-day warning (payment is due July 1 - see http://www.usmarshals.gov/assets/2014/bitcoins/ ). If total trade volume between now and then is (let's say) $2mil btc, an extra 30k just increases the volume over that time period by 1.5% -- a drop in the bucket.

Seems a bit more coordinated than that. Some whale operating on Stamp has been keeping the market down all last week. Of course, foreknowledge of a news event like that could no doubt be easily come by prior to the official announcement.

Also volume does not equal quantity of Bitcoins. Compared to what I was like a few months back, I have been pretty inactive in Bitcoin of late, Still, in the past 3 weeks, I have probably account for 150 Bitcoins worth of trade, with all my entries and exits from the market. I currently hold just 15 BTC. So perhaps a rule of thumb would be to divide volume by 10 in order to find the real amount of Bitcoins that the market has a capacity for holding and in reality, you would have to divide the total volume with a much greater number than 10 in order to find out how much Bitcoin the market players are holding or capable of buying/selling.

Oh c'mon, how do you REALLY know that some "whale" is doing this on purpose? How do you KNOW??


Here's another way to calculate. The volume on Bitstamp right now is around one-tenth the total volume of all exchanges, according to here: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/volumepie/
If you were to drop one-tenth of the SR coins (about 3000 coins) right now onto Bitstamp, unexpectedly, in one big market order all at once, the slippage would drop the market by about $45 per coin. Then it would immediately recover a significant chunk of that $45 when people saw the cheap coins and placed orders that they had not placed as limit orders. That tells us that the flash $80 drop was an overreaction.

Interesting that the prices on Bitstamp and Bitfinex have now equalized.

EDIT: The issue of price differential between stamp and bfx is addressed here:
http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/news/bitcoin-trading-platform-bitfinex-distancing-bitstamp/2014/06/12