[Tracking Orders (Отслеживающие Заявки)]

4 года назад мы создали первую инновацию в мире фьючерсной торговли биткойнами - обратные фьючерсы. Сейчас пришло время предложить трейдерам новый инструмент для повышения эффективности торговли.

Для внутридневной торговли, арбитража или хеджирования своих инвестиций одинаково важно быстро реагировать на рыночную ситуацию. От этой скорости напрямую зависит прибыльность ваших сделок.
Tracking Orders (Отслеживающие Заявки) - новый тип заявок, который помогает решить эту задачу.
   
Забудьте о бессонных ночах перед экраном компьютера в попытках вручную угнаться за изменениями цены на биткойн, ненадёжных и сложных в обслуживании торговых роботах.

Заявки Tracking Orders всё упрощают:

• 1. Укажите количество контрактов для покупки или продажи
• 2. Выберите ту цену, которую заявка будет автоматически отслеживать: лучший bid, лучший ask или цена последней сделки на бирже Bitstamp
• 3. Введите значение премии/дисконта ("спред") к целевой цене в процентах

Цена заявки будет автоматически обновляться каждые 10 секунд.

Использование этого типа заявок совершенно бесплатно и не несёт никаких прямых или косвенных издержек. Даже больше, с их помощью вы можете стать поставщиком ликвидности и получить 80% скидку на комиссию!

Команда OrderBook.net всегда открыта для предложений и обсуждения. Можно использовать наш чат на торговой странице, задать вопрос здесь на форуме или написать нам емейл напрямую на info@icbit.se.

Также рады сообщить, что ребрендинг ICBIT завершён и приглашаем вас посмотреть наш новый сайт.

Disclaimer: Тип заявок Tracking Orders сейчас находится в режиме бета-тестирования. Мы делаем всё возможное для того, чтобы они работали согласно заявленному описанию. Если источник данных цен (официальное API биржи Bitstamp) перестанет работать или предоставит некорректные данные, мы не можем гарантировать мгновенную отмену ваших заявок. Пожалуйста используйте наш программный интерфейс API если вы хотите полностью управлять своими заявками. Торговля фьючерсами - это риск.

[Tracking Orders]

And we are proud of it!
4 years ago we created the first innovation in the bitcoin world - the inverse futures. Now it's time to create yet another one to simplify trading futures.

Whether you are day trading, arbitraging or hedging your investment, the one who promptly reacts to the market gets the most out of it.
Tracking Orders is a new, unique tool which greatly helps in this task.   
   
Forget sleepless nights trying to catch up moving price on spot markets, unreliable and complex trading bots, or negotiations in the chatroom.

Tracking Orders feature makes it all very simple:

• 1. Specify how much contracts you want to buy or sell
• 2. Pick the target price - Bitstamp's last, or best bid/ask which the tracking order will automatically follow
• 3. Choose the premium/discount ("spread") to the target price

Price of your Tracking Orders will be automatically readjusted every 10 seconds.

Tracking Orders feature is absolutely free to use and does not incur any direct or indirect fees. Even better, they make you eligible for huge 80% trading fee discount as a liquidity provider!

OrderBook.net team is always open to comments and suggestions. You can use our chatroom on the trading page or email us directly at info@icbit.se.
Also we are glad to report that the rebranding of ICBIT is now complete, and we invite you to try our new website.


Disclaimer: Tracking Orders feature is in beta-testing stage now. We will do everything to make sure it works as expected. If the data source (Bitstamp's official API endpoint) disappears or provides incorrect data we can't guarantee immediate removal of your orders. Please use our API If you want full control over your orders. Trade at your own risk.

Trust and transparency are always an important thing in any business, and particularly in Bitcoin.

To further build trust in a bitcoin futures market we are developing since 2011, we decided to release all company information:

• official address
• registration number
• certificates
• articles of association
• GMEI Legal Entity Number

Twitter: https://twitter.com/orderbooknet

Hello!

If you like to schedule a meeting with ICBIT team at Bitcoin 2014 in Amsterdam, please send your requests to info@icbit.se
We are glad to discuss new business opportunities, ideas and partnership.

https://twitter.com/icbit_se/status/464485794368212992


Regards,
Alex

[unique conditions]

Hello,
as the ICBIT trading volume grows, there is a need for more futures market liquidity. For example, the sell side of the order book is empty almost all the time, and whenever something appears there, it gets bought out within seconds.

The futures/spot contango on September futures is about $50, the June contango was just reduced by market makers (it was about $40). This is "free" money if you arbitrage between Mt.Gox and ICBIT (sell futures on ICBIT and buy BTC on MtGox).

However, to have bigger and more stable market, ICBIT is calling for market makers who jointly would provide buy and sell sides of the orderbook, thus making futures trading more fast, more thoroughly tracking the spot price movements.

We are ready to provide unique conditions: personal support from me (including help with the API, introducing changes to make the API better suit your needs, etc), fast connection to the server (special API server for market makers if the generic one is too busy) and of course very low (or even totally zero!) trading fees.

Please ask your questions here, and send your requests for market maker status to info@icbit.se

[Classical Arbitrage]

Hello,
in this thread I would like to discuss spot/futures arbitrage basic ideas, provide reference implementations and listen to your suggestions.

Classical Arbitrage
Wikipedia explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spot-future_parity
Basically, arbitraging means that you get the profit no matter which way the price moves. Futures arbitrage is a way of taking advantage from price difference of the underlying asset and the price of its futures contract.
Every futures contract gets mispriced from time to time and arbitragers can profit from that.
For example, right now average rate of BTC/USD futures at ICBIT is $14.66 and spot price at MtGox is $13.30, hence the difference being $1.30 !

How to actually get profit from that? Two ways exist:
1. "Long the basis":
 a. Buy BTC on MtGox for USD (which you own) and sell futures contracts on ICBIT.
 b. Close positions (buy futures contracts on ICBIT and sell BTC on MtGox) when the futures spread (spot/futures price difference) changed enough for you to get profit.
or
 c. Wait till futures contract is settled and sell BTC on MtGox

2. "Short the basis":
 a. Sell BTC (which you own) on MtGox for USD and buy futures contracts on ICBIT
 b. Close positions (sell futures contracts on ICBIT and buy BTC on MtGox back) when the futures spread (spot/futures price difference) changed enough for you to get profit.
or
 c. Wait till futures contract is settled and buy BTC on MtGox

Both ways will get you profit.
As it's already noted, it's not necessary to wait till futures settlement. Many (the vast majority of traders on fiat-money exchanges for example) trade futures spread instead: open arbitrage positions when the spread is high, close arbitrage positions when the spread is low.

Arbitraging with bitcoins is not harder than arbitraging on fiat-money exchanges, even simpler, but you need to understand a few important points:
1. BTCUSD futures contracts price is in USD, however profit/loss is accounted in BTC. Every contract is for $10. This makes it a bit harder to understand, but it makes it very easy to arbitrage (you have the same price scale: US dollars per 1 bitcoin). Contract explained here: https://icbit.se/BUH3
2. To buy/sell contracts on ICBIT you only need bitcoins. Marginal trading is available at no additional cost.
3. To buy/sell BTC on MtGox, you need to either have US dollars, or to have BTC which you want to sell in exchange for US dollars.
4. If you want to get your profit in US dollars, you may need to convert it to US dollars on some exchange (might be using ICBIT's exchange section, but it lacks volume now).

Example:
John opens his arbitrage position by buying 100 BTC on MtGox spending $1330, and selling 133 futures contracts on ICBIT for $14.66 (requiring a maintenance deposit of 14 BTC on his account there).
Some hours later the prices converge a bit, with MtGox being at $13.8, and ICBIT being $14.0.
So John buys back 133 futures contracts for $14.00 providing him positive variation margin on ICBIT equal to Profit = ((1 / 14.0 - 1 / 14.66) * -10) * -133 =  4.277 BTC (converted to US dollars that's $59)
and sells his position on MtGox which gives him $1380, plus $59 on ICBIT's account in BTC, thus totalling in $109 profit.

Another example:
John opens his arbitrage position by buying 100 BTC on MtGox spending $1330, and selling 133 futures contracts on ICBIT for $14.66 (requiring a maintenance deposit of 14 BTC on his account there).
Some days later the contract is settled on the sport price at MtGox being $13.0.
So John gets his 133 futures contracts settled on $13.00 providing him positive variation margin on ICBIT equal to Profit = ((1 / 13.0 - 1 / 14.66) * -10) * -133 =  11.585 BTC (converted to US dollars that's $150)
and sells his position on MtGox which gives him $1300 (a loss of $30 bucks) and $150 on ICBIT's account in BTC, thus totalling in $120 profit.

The basic idea is, wherever market moves, your profit is guaranteed.

Capt. Obvious suggests that automated arbitrage would be the best I will edit this post to add information about actual automated trading bots and API discussion, but before I do that, please let me know if you have any questions about the above.

Hello!
As the development and testing of the futures market at ICBIT nears the moment when it could go live, I would like to listen to opinions of what futures contracts would you really want to trade first, to get interest and to prepare liquidity providers/market makers for those contracts.

It's a very important moment for the Bitcoin economy, so please take your chance and vote for what would actually be useful for you.
Every user has 6 votes (equal to the number of options), so that you can put your votes to the specific contracts you want to trade (or even put all of them to one contract, if you are not interested in trading anything else).

The results of this poll would be used when launching the derivatives market. Before that, all papers related to contracts specification, margin system, and trading will be published and discussed here.

Thanks,
Alex.

[HOW TO TRADE]

Hello,
let me introduce the new trading platform, called https://icbit.se. There is already a long thread about its Derivatives market section ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50817.msg605807#msg605807 ). However, by reading numerous messages about problems on Mt.Gox and TradeHill, slowness of orders execution, be it web interface or special API (which should be in fact designed to ease server's work), I suspect there is a need in a better, competing exchange.

I constructed the new exchange using my multiple years of experience in the stock and derivatives trading (including HFT, quantative trading), but I tried to make it comfortable for existing traders' practices used by Bitcoin community. My wish for ICBIT is to be considered as the next step of Bitcoin exchanges evolution, something like "Exchange 2.0".

Some of the new architectural features which make ICBIT different from already existing exchanges:

• Advanced, very high-performance trading engine.
• Redis-based data storage for active data and traditional SQL database storage for historic data.
• Real time web trading client. No polling, no slowness, what you see in the web trading client is updated at real time.
• (One very important feature which will make active trading WAY more convinient coming soon... )
• Websocket API.
• Partnership with leading money transfer services for fast and convinient money deposit/withdrawal and key projects in the Bitcoin community (announcements coming soon...).

As I already told in my other topics, ICBIT is a community-driven project, so it evolves according to the demand of the Bitcoin community.

Right now, only Currency Trading section is enabled, Derivatives markets will be the next step after Currency Trading goes live.

HOW TO TRADE.
DISCLAIMER: The trading platform is in beta testing stage, so it obviously may have problems, misbehave or just don't work at a given moment of time. The purpose of this testing is to eliminate as much of problems as possible before going live. Email address for any questions is given at the website's front page.

1. Register at the website (if you haven't already) to obtain global ICBIT authentication credentials.
2. Go to the web trading client (https://icbit.se/WebTrade/).
3. Log in there with your global ICBIT login and password (it's not mandatory to be logged in at the main website).
4. Go to "Funds" tab. Follow on-screen instructions to deposit (or later withdraw) some money.
5. Go to "Currency Trading" tab. Now you can create buy/sell orders, watch the market depth (order book), keep an eye on your waller and a list of orders.

If you encounter any problem, have some useful suggestion - reply to this thread, and I would fix it.

Hello,
I am getting private messages on this forum and emails asking me about the derivatives market platform I am working on (since summer of 2011), and because the work entered into final development stage, I decided to start this thread. Ideally it should become a good place for collaborative work on the platform, where the community decides what and how is going to work.

Website: https://icbit.se

Short features description of the trading platform (in its current design):
- Futures (and later options) trading is the main target.
- All derivatives being traded are accounted in Bitcoins and/or other currencies. Futures with settling in non-crypto currencies or exchange traded stocks will be considered later.
- Marginal trading from the first day of trading.
- Low latency of trade execution and high throughput (thousands of trades per day for a start).
- Automatic, quick Bitcoins deposit/withdrawal as many times as you like.

What is it good for in terms of crypto-currencies economy?
- Hedging the Bitcoin conversion rate risk for miners.
- Stabilizing the Bitcoin conversion rate (spot and derivatives market are two essential and self-complementing parts necessary for a currency market to be stable).
- Ability to trade major indexes/commodities/energy futures (e.g. S&P500mf, Brent f, etc) in Bitcoins.

As you can see, it brings a lot of opportunities for all kind of people - miners to be sure they are insured from the BitCoin rate drop; investors to be able to buy/sell index futures without the need to change BitCoins to US Dollars / Euros and back; algorithmic traders to take profits from arbitrage and quantative trading; etc etc etc.

Trading is now live for BTCUSD-3.13, OIL-02.13 and GOLD-02.13 futures contracts. Just go to https://icbit.se, register and trade.

Please feel free to ask any questions.

Screenshot of the older version of futures trading interface (updated 2012-06-15):

Taking a chance to hijack the thread , what alternative similar to LibertyReserve exists in Eurozone? Anything credible? I tried sending an inquiry to payson.se about using them as a payment process for the bitcoin exchange, but I didn't receive any reply yet.

Hello,
I'm developing a futures trading platform, and wanted to share thoughts and ask for opinions about the preferred client to use.

First of all, let's put a few words about what makes this "stock exchange" different from existing ones:
1. It's not a currency exchange service. BTC is one and only accepted currency to buy/sell futures contracts.
2. It's a derivative market nominated in BTC. All contracts are settled in cash (no physical delivery contracts, of course).
3. Margin trading possible.
4. Market maker exist, and others are welcome to participate in market making. This means the contracts will be liquid and often tradeable.
5. Suitable for speculative trading (margin trading makes it possible to profit more than on a usual currency exchange), aiming at thousands of trades per hour. This is good for helping establish a real BTC to other currencies ratio.
6. Suitable for hedging. Miners, etc could hedge the risk of BTC exchange ratio going down by means of a USD futures contract, for example.

Now a question which I'd like to discuss here. What client would you want to use in order to trade? Possible options with my comments:
1. Trade via web interface. The easiest way, but professional futures traders don't trade much via web interface. It's not fast enough, it's not usable enough. Usually it's done via a special client which allows to pick a price level, set an order and watch its execution almost instantly.
2. Trade using a special client (in addition to web-interface).
3. Use already existing client. Anyone trades in the US or Europe? What do you use for connecting your MTS?

I tihnk the most realistic option is to develop an opensource client for the exchange, which would have an open API for connecting mechanical trading systems, and also have an ability to export historic and real-time data to a Metastock compatible format so that most of the existing technical analysis software could be used.

Feel free to share your opinions.