I just calculated this interesting statistic using trade data pulled from the mtgox api:

Price 24 hrs ago:   $3.01
Current Price:       $3.10
Day High:            $3.14

24hr Buying (bid) Volume: 33536 btc / $103443
24hr Selling (ask) Volume: 35696 btc / $109202

The price is still above the opening price 24 hours ago, but there has been more selling going on than buying to the tune of 2160 btc, or $5759. Yet the price is still higher than it was at opening. Is it just me, or does this seem odd to anyone? Or are my calculations wrong somehow?

ROFL! 

This is a 60 day heat-map that shows particular areas of price 'heat' or activity. It is a very good indicator of real price support confirmed by actual trading and not the mtgox depth chart, which is very misleading. You can see a lot of support at around $2.60, and a lot less at $2.90. Thats why I think the $2.90 area will be tested, and if it fails we will slide back to at least $2.60.

There is very little going on actually. The silence is creepy.

We had a strong bullish onslaught yesterday and now things are plateauing. It is likely that the manipulator owns a significant part of the ask walls, so he is profiting nicely from the coins that he purchased when the price was low. It was relatively easy to pump the price then, but it becomes more and more expensive to do so as it increases. Once profit taking is complete, the price will fall again as the bulls cash out and take back all the fiat they pumped it with.

Do you never get tired of that Jonathan? It seems like such blatant propaganda.
You're probably right, but can you not try to be a bit less sardonic about it?

I think we are going back to about $2.60, the site of the first large bidwall. A lot of activity occurred there. If we break down through $2.60, it's going further down. If it rebounds from $2.60, then we can expect more upside.

Made this chart to determine real demand by editing out the large bidwalls.



vs

I have a sneaking suspicion that this rally is starting to come to an end too. The past day, the market has become extremely overbought. A correction is looming, but i don't think we will be going back to anywhere near the $2 mark.

Oh my. Sorry to hear that #9.

A little rally, supported by giant bidwalls!
Lets see if anyone tries to take them on.

By then it would be too late (RSI > 70 for ages), and you would want to be shorting.
You want to try and stay a step ahead of the curve, not be running to catch up with it.

Isn't it incredibly incongruent? When you realize that bigger forces are at play than fundamentals, to succeed you must understand the irrational psychology of the players. To win in an irrational market, you must yourself be able to act rationally on seemingly irrational market directions even if that means you have to sometimes make what would seem at the time to be an irrational decision, based on something with little observable evidence in its favor other than abstract ideas about market psychology.

Whoops. Accidentally deleted my post. Reposted.

There won't be much downwards volatility with a 50k buy wall sitting at 2.65. If your bid is below that, I doubt you will have much chance of getting it filled unless the wall is pulled and a freefall occurs. And in that case, you probably wouldn't want them anyway.

If you want trade for more coins in a rising market, the best strategy is to hold off on selling until the peaks have been reached, then sell, wait for price to fall and rebuy - buy low, sell high... obviously. Of course, you first need to hold the coins before you can take your profit at the peaks. It's difficult to profit in coin when the market is rising as the coins become harder and harder to buy. In a falling market, it's easy - because nobody else wants to hold them.

That is a difficult one to answer. It depends what your objectives and interests are, what your trading strategy is, and your general outlook for the bitcoin system. If you want hold bitcoins, then definitely yes. If you want to gamble on the probability of the price rising, you probably should. If you think the price is more likely to fall, then you shouldn't. If you are asking for trading advice from the users of this forum... be careful. Words come from the teeth out and interests can become very conflicted here.

As I already mentioned, I bought back in at $2.20 and recommended at the time that others do the same. So I will recommend that again now, because my opinion has not changed. I think we have already hit rock bottom, and that the downward trend of the past several months has finally shown signs of breaking. But also take into consideration that I am already 40c/coin up before you listen to me. My view is of the long term however, and I tend to ignore short term signals because the white noise does nothing but make me question my own decisions.

Maybe, a little from column A and a little from column B. We could speculate all night on the how's and why's of it. But in the end, what matters is that the downtrend is showing multiple signs of failure. I think we have now reached (and departed from) the bottom of the market. As the days go by, this scenario appears more and more likely.

What is interesting, is that for the first time, the manipulator seems to have changed his strategy.

Typically the manipulator would place a wall and wait for bids to accumulate, then there would be a massive sell off followed by pulling of the walls and a huge price drop. A lot of people will have been waiting for that again... but unfortunately for them, this time we saw a huge buy, and a new wall placed well in front of the last. Hope it didn't hurt all our poor shorting bears too much.

Our manipulator has changed from bearish to bullish tactics. This is definitive trend reversal behavior.

I'm glad I got back in at $2.20!

 

Well, it looks as though the hopes of those elusive $1.xx coins have been well and truly dashed.
This is going to make for an interesting night!

I just discovered that the bitcoin daemon had crashed on the server. I'm not sure how long it has been like that, but if you tried to send payment and it failed to give you a payment address, everything is back to normal again.

It gets the mjcmurfy stamp of approval too.