Stupid investors or bad bots?

[Mabsark]

I just placed a bid on BTC-TC for 2 shares. I placed that bid at 0.000001 BTC above a bid for 400 shares. That bid for 400 shares was then upped to 0.000001 BTC above my bid. My bid for 2 shares being above the bid for 400 shares is completely insignificant. By upping the bid to 0.000001 BTC above my bid, the bidder will pay an extra 0.0008 for their shares.

If you're an investor doing this, you're completely and utterly retarded. Personally though, I think this is the action of a stupid bot as the change occurs pretty much instantly. If you're using such a bot, you may want to get in touch with the developer because that bot is costing you money.

If someone has an order to buy 1 share and you want to place an order to buy 100 shares, you don't have to outbid that order for 1 share. That order is insignificant to yours. Just ignore it and place your bid at 0.000001 above the next significant order in the list. For example, If the top bid look like the following,

1 @ 0.0001
2 @ 0.00009
3 @ 0.00008
500 @ 0.00007

you'd want to place your order at 0.00008.

So you should probably get your bots modified to take that into account, or the bot will be losing you money.

[Entropy-uc]

Be quiet!

I have exploited this behavior many times.

[Rannasha]

This is pretty easy to exploit if you're trying to sell into the bid. First probe to see if you can get bots to raise and then dump when they don't want to raise any further.

The bot I'm currently developing will have an added check to see if the volume of the bids above it exceeds a certain percentage of the volume of its own bid before raising, to prevent this kind of exploitation.

[Peter Lambert]

Maybe it is somebody trying to manipulate the price upward?

[keatonatron]

Don't ruin it for the rest of us! These types of observances can be profitable to the people who notice them

[zoinky]

Stupid investors or bad bots?

Both.