I'm pretty happy with bitstamp, but market depth can be terrible there. Had some nice, early trades that should have given me a decent profit ruined by excessive slippage.
Which is surprsing. Looking at the overall volume (say, 30d) bitstamp volume is about half of mtgox, maybe a bit less. However it seems that at any given point, bitstamp market depth is perhaps a quarter or less of mtgox depth. I have no good explanation for that.
I have an explanation. Market making bots are using MtGox API through the huge amount of open source code available. Show me a ruby gem that covers what I need for the BitStamp API and maybe I'll move over. Sure, it wouldn't be too hard to do it myself, but I'm a full time student, teaching two classes, and my MtGox bot is still pulling in profits.
Edit: Okay, there is a bitstamp gem available, but still it is not a drop in replacement for what I have running on mtgox, so it will have to wait at least until my next long weekend. And to be clear, I'm not saying my bot is significant here, but other operators are likely in the same situation.
Guess I don't get it, since I never ran a bot for trading... does your bot place orders well ahead of time (i.e. they become part of the order book)? I alway thought the point of bot trading was to wait until the very last moment, when some price action triggers the bot's condition set, at which point it will place an order, which could be only minutes before the order is executed, so that the money/the btc never really appear on the order book. Can you clarify this for me?
There are different types of bots. Mine maintains orders on both sides of the book. In other words, I profit from dampening the swings. Historically, MtGox has been too laggy for the type of bot you are describing to work well. It might be better now, but I haven't investigated recently.
