Shorts on Bitfinex at a all time high!

[BayAreaCoins]

If this one person was shorting 13,000 bitcoin in OkCoin - it is likely that the total amount is at least 50,000
http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/33eepx/okcoin_futures_largest_contract_holder_margin/

Isn't it effectively suicide to play with such big sums in a market that's barely liquid enough to support those huge shorts? I mean, his stop seemed a bit poorly placed, if this rather small move has cost him that much! Can't imagine losing that much money!

Ya when you get a position that large with leverage some times even trying to help yourself would kill yourself... best to just let it go tits up I've found.

[ensurance982]

If this one person was shorting 13,000 bitcoin in OkCoin - it is likely that the total amount is at least 50,000
http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/33eepx/okcoin_futures_largest_contract_holder_margin/

Isn't it effectively suicide to play with such big sums in a market that's barely liquid enough to support those huge shorts? I mean, his stop seemed a bit poorly placed, if this rather small move has cost him that much! Can't imagine losing that much money!

Dude is either a retarded greedy bastard that is flat out stupid, making moves w/ inside knowledge or using play money.

I guess so, but don't think that he's necessarily acting on inside knowledge - it's incredibly dangerous to act on inside knowledge using a leveraged position - you might hit your stops before it goes in the direction you expect. I guess it's kinda cynical to call this amount play money, but I guess that's exactly what is is for him/her

[Bit_Happy]

I am not verse with various financial instruments. Can u plz explain in short what are these Shorts, Futures are ?

It means people have borrowed and sold on the market a total of 28531.03 bitcoins hoping to buy them back at a cheaper rate and take profits. It also means these bitcoins will have to be bought back on the market at some point.

More people panicking once the rally gets moving. 
Let the Bears try to party, the fundamentals are working out strongly in favor of the Bulls.

[tokeweed]

Once this goes up and stops get hit on the way up, this is gonna be WHOOOSH!  To the moon!

[fonzie]

I am not verse with various financial instruments. Can u plz explain in short what are these Shorts, Futures are ?

It means people have borrowed and sold on the market a total of 28531.03 bitcoins hoping to buy them back at a cheaper rate and take profits. It also means these bitcoins will have to be bought back on the market at some point.

More people panicking once the rally gets moving.  
Let the Bears try to party, the fundamentals are working out strongly in favor of the Bulls.

We have been partying like bosses for more than 16 months now, and we won´t stop before winter starts.
I won´t even mention these few weak attempts from the (clinical dead) bulls to get something going but it would be too embarassing for the traders, the holders, the Bitcoin network, yet for the whole human mankind if all the details of this overhypesed pyramid scheme would get public.
So you should probably just look uninvolved to the ground while everyone else is laughing maniacal BTC go to single/double digits. During these turbulences you might get a chance to sneak out of your town into another country where nobody has heard about your involvement with Bitcoin.
At least the kids won´t spit @ you over there.

[RoadTrain]

32,538.09 BTC
Shorting in da house

[tokeweed]

32,538.09 BTC
Shorting in da house

Just 32,538.09?

[molecular]

Breath of fresh air for the shorts.... https://blockchain.info/tx/97facbd7e07c4f3140d9ea167c2e54d85bc5f6fd04d9774d80b1284b706920ff

that guy lost around 300k from the falling bitcoin price shorts are going crazy as usual lol

How do you know that this transaction is from the guy who got his short margin called? I believe it is just some random big transaction we don't really know the source of. Sure, it could be some early adopter cashing out, but it could just be an exchange shifting around some money.

or: someone with a huge wallet moved 101 BTC.

Interesting. I only now see that the assumed amount if BTC actually transacted is at 101 BTC. I've seen this metric being off a few times with transactions of my own. Is the algorithm behind this figure known? It's always great to read all the wild theories people develop when such a big transaction occurs from time to time.

I bet part of the metric is the precision of the output amounts. High precision amounts have higher likelyhood of being the change output. 101 has much higher precision than 69,471.082201.
 

Ah yes, that makes actually a lot of sense! I unfortunately can't quite remember the transaction where blockchain.info mis-guessed the amount if was transferring. Still interesting to see what this transaction may have accomplished for the owner of the address... maybe cashing out 101 BTC?

Yes, he probably moved 101 BTC to an exchange. PREPARE FOR DUMP!!! ;-)

[molecular]

yet another ATH in BTC swaps.

I'm still flabbergasted by the amount of USD swaps, though. It's still roughly 4-5 times higher than the BTC ones.

[inca]

yet another ATH in BTC swaps.

I'm still flabbergasted by the amount of USD swaps, though. It's still roughly 4-5 times higher than the BTC ones.

I wouldn't be. Long swaps well below the ATH from 2014, whilst shorts are breaking new highs chasing diminishing gains.

This is all just noise until the whales going long let the elastic band go and retail shorters learn why shorting a hypervolatile commodity is a seriously stupid idea.

[chmod755]

I'm not using Bitfinex myself but just looked at their charts. Can you go short on LTCBTC or LTCUSD or both?

[NotHatinJustTrollin]

I'm not using Bitfinex myself but just looked at their charts. Can you go short on LTCBTC or LTCUSD or both?

Yes. Both.

[RoadTrain]

I wouldn't be. Long swaps well below the ATH from 2014, whilst shorts are breaking new highs chasing diminishing gains.

This is all just noise until the whales going long let the elastic band go and retail shorters learn why shorting a hypervolatile commodity is a seriously stupid idea.

But long swaps are holding stable while we're grinding lower. While during previous dumps they tended to decrease significantly towards the end of the dump.

I'm not sure how it's important, but the lower we go, the drier are bids (in dollars). So it's making me cautios.

[inca]

I wouldn't be. Long swaps well below the ATH from 2014, whilst shorts are breaking new highs chasing diminishing gains.

This is all just noise until the whales going long let the elastic band go and retail shorters learn why shorting a hypervolatile commodity is a seriously stupid idea.

But long swaps are holding stable while we're grinding lower. While during previous dumps they tended to decrease significantly towards the end of the dump.

I'm not sure how it's important, but the lower we go, the drier are bids (in dollars). So it's making me cautios.

Yep - bitcoin could crash and smash the previous low as it craters.

But if bitcoin doesn't crash and instead holds its ground then those 32000 btc need to be bought back and will probably fuel the fire that ignites us breaking the downtrend over the next few weeks/months technically. I can see a situation where bitcoin rises 100% in a single day off the back of some newsflow (probably ETF or wall street related) due to a combination of shorts closing or getting margin called as big bids start rolling in pushing the price up relentlessly.

In retrospect it will be obvious that dreaming for single and double digit bitcoins was nonsense. That the market was massively oversold, massively over shorted after a year long bear market and was due a big snap back to reality.

[kwukduck]

Miners haven't been mining at such great loss for a long time, so they hold or they short. Most of them are smart and know the market is collapsing, so they short, causing more pressure for the market to go down, causing them to have to short more, causing more pressure. See this market CAN only crash, there isn't even potential to go up.

[inca]

Miners haven't been mining at such great loss for a long time, so they hold or they short. Most of them are smart and know the market is collapsing, so they short, causing more pressure for the market to go down, causing them to have to short more, causing more pressure. See this market CAN only crash, there isn't even potential to go up.

Hedging mining supply is one thing. Destroying the market value of the commodity you produce is quite another. You don't hedge your supply by market selling 8000 coins into the orderbooks on an exchange.

[molecular]

Miners haven't been mining at such great loss for a long time, so they hold or they short. Most of them are smart and know the market is collapsing, so they short, causing more pressure for the market to go down, causing them to have to short more, causing more pressure. See this market CAN only crash, there isn't even potential to go up.

There's a flaw in your logic:

Miners don't have to increase their hedging volume when price drops.

[ElectricMucus]

yet another ATH in BTC swaps.

I'm still flabbergasted by the amount of USD swaps, though. It's still roughly 4-5 times higher than the BTC ones.

Are you guys purposefully ignorant? There is a chart intended to compare the value of swaps on this very site.

Oh of course the amount of Bitcoins required for a certain amount of value in swap lingo went up when prices went down.

If you want to judge the sediment you guys are using the wrong chart.

https://bfxdata.com/sentiment/longshort

Total Active Long Swaps vs Short Swaps vs BTCUSD price (shorts expressed in USD equivalent): displays the total sum of all active swaps on bitfinex. the green area is the total sum of USD swaps over time (i.e swaps used for long positions, margin traders use USD swaps in long positions). The 2 red areas represent the total sum of BTC and LTC Swaps (i.e swaps used for short positions, margin traders use BTC / LTC swaps in short positions). To make the values better comparable I represented the sum of BTC and LTC swaps in USD worth. otherwise you would be comparing apples and oranges

I hate quoting myself but it's on page 2

[molecular]

I'm still flabbergasted by the amount of USD swaps.

better, electricmucus?

[ElectricMucus]

yeah.
To say what this thread really is supposed be about: How overextend is the short/long side in comparison?
In context of the previous ATH that is 81.8% of the ATH for longs and 95.5% for shorts.

The other thing is the ratio between shorts/longs that is more of a indicator of "how dangerous is a short squeeze" if you look right now that's at 21.1%