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[netrin]

To my eyeballs, the pattern we see today best matches December. Even when viewed on a log scale, this summer pattern is larger and longer than any previous pattern. The former jumped ~5x within a month and plateaued for two months while around May prices jumped ~20x within two months. Does it reasonably follow that we can expect this plateau to last another month or more? Chodpaba, would that sort of thinking fit your models?

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[Ellen Alemany]

Well, I'll tell you what then. There is one thing that has worked better than anything I have come up with for predicting the day's price, at least lately... That is, yesterday's price.

Then your models are no good..?

[Oldminer]

Right now the daily model does not produce an output that is more predictive than the previous day's price.

Human emotion is a difficult thing to predict

[notme]

So how does your model respond to the spikes today?

[geek-trader]

So how does your model respond to the spikes today?

So far it is no factor, because I am looking at TradeHill numbers for my analysis, and this has not yet resulted in a confirmation on TradeHill. The way I think about it, attempts at price manipulation are not really successful unless the changes they produce propagate to the other exchanges. If noise from those attempts and noise from other exchange 'errors' are validated on the second-highest volume exchange then I consider them 'valid'. Conversely, it would be useless to attempt market manipulation from an exchange like TradeHill as it would just get eaten up by arbitrage orders and not affect Mt. Gox at all. It is a cheap and easy way to do data filtering.

If it is durable enough to move TradeHill prices much from when I used them last then I will take another look.

Right now, MtGox is at 14 and TradeHill is at 14.2

[netrin]

at the front end I would expect a variance of no more than 5% to 10%, but a the back end more like 10% to 20%...
2011-07-23      $13.386   $14.096   actual: 13.51   13.77
2011-07-24      $13.208   $14.331   actual: 13.6   14.1
2011-07-25      $12.903   $13.995
2011-07-26      $12.778   $13.559

Maestro!

If the trend is precisely within your modeled range, as it has been, does this new conforming data add very much information/precision going forward?

[Flappy]

attempts at price manipulation...

Does today's activity not look like normal market activity?

[notme]

All activity can look like price manipulation until it is confirmed.

[Ellen Alemany]

Well, I'll tell you what then. There is one thing that has worked better than anything I have come up with for predicting the day's price, at least lately... That is, yesterday's price.

Then your models are no good..?

Right now the daily model does not produce an output that is more predictive than the previous day's price.

Even (the price of yesterday)*0.25 + (price of today)*0.75 should outperform that model?

I don't know how you evaluate so the problem might lie there? Of course on some specific days your model will perform worse than doing nothing but if it is doing so over time then it is not good at all...

[Oldminer]

Nice.  I'd be interested to see your extended forecasts.

[Ellen Alemany]

It doesn't do that well when there is no data. A flat line does not contain very much data.

I think I formulated my reply poorly, what I meant was that just because your model is not doing well on a short period it does not mean it won't long-term. On some specific intervals the model should perform worse than doing nothing.

[newMeat1]

Very cool! Of course, showing this to the community will change the price...

And you never know what's going to happen with bitcoins. There's always some curveball waiting to blindside us

[TraderTimm]

The zero-fee bots still seem to be going strong. If I don't see a change in spreads over the next few days I am going to have to presume we can expect another month of this. This will weigh heavily in my analysis going forward.

I'm torn about this plateau. While I like the fact that we can point to the price history and tell people "Look, stop waving your hands, we've been here over a month without massive swings." I'd also like to see some kind of trending.

Can't have it both ways, I guess. I assume we're basing like we did before the upswing through parity.

[TiagoTiago]

Are these bots making profits with roundtrips or are they just working as the backend for exchangers?

[newMeat1]

It looks like customers are fleeing from Mt Gox with the reduced trade rates ending. I say so because Mt Gox volume has dropped by a factor of 3, but the other exchanges are holding up.

I think some of the slow trading action has been due to people transferring out of Gox.

[TiagoTiago]

I mean other exchanges, specially ones that buy and sell both ways instead of letting people exchange currency between themselves.

[shmadz]

interesting to see the analysis, my take on the relative stability over the last few weeks:

having a stable price between 13-14 should give merchants more confidence to begin accepting bitcoins.

that's my dream, to be able to walk into a subway and buy my lunch for 0.5 BTC...

or how about filling the cart at walmart for a whopping 7 BTC?

if the major retailers get on board, we might see some movement, but for now, it's still just "fringe economics"

[TiagoTiago]

I'm still hoping we'll reach around 100 USD per BTC before the exchange rate changes start to slow down permanently

[TraderTimm]

Case in point:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1zigHourlyzvztgSzm1g10zm2g25

Even with large(ish) volume spikes the bots just snap the price right back to where it was before.

The bots rule...

Yep, nice little 'sawtooth' wave. Saw that one early this morning. Aaaaand we're back in the 13.50 range again. I'm not complaining really, if it removes the casual players due to boredom - I won't be crying. Also sure beats "CRASH CRASH CRASH" threads every couple of days in the forums.

[bitcoinBull]

Case in point:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1zigHourlyzvztgSzm1g10zm2g25

Even with large(ish) volume spikes the bots just snap the price right back to where it was before.

The bots rule...

Sorry to deliver FUD but at the moment its not clear that the spike to $14.8999 was genuine, because that happened during the attempted upgrade (correct me if I'm wrong).  So also not clear if the volume today is accurate.  Waiting on a second update from support.mtgox.com "*** Initial announcement - more details will be made available within the next hours. ***"