I use bitfinex since months, so far it was reliable, btc/ltc withdrawals always where executed in the next hours after withdrawal requests. so far, i like it and trust it so much that 1/3 of my btc is in there. if bitfinex was more transparent in terms of clarity of the functions, i think it could be a huge platform - if you can trade leveraged, there is no sense in trading unleveraged unless youre a whale imho. in terms of registration/licensing as a financial service i have strong doubts if there is any registration pending...
Some points that I would like to discuss:
-I didnt yet manage to get access to the bitfinex forum (no invite code..). Mail to the site operator wasnt answered. Documentation is dismal - there are articles on the wiki, faq entries and some forum posts that you can google. every one of it contains only peaces of the whole explanation. for example the function of margin trade is not explained in a single article.
-When you go short using your tradable balance, right after the order was filled, it shows a huge positive p/l for some time until the p/l is adjusted to the market price. if you close that position during that time youre fucked.
-there sometimes is a lag between bitstamp prices shown on bitcoinwisdom and those on bitfinex. right now i.e. bitfinex shows 166,67, bitstamp just dropped to 165,15. some peaks/bottoms are not tradeable that way.
-I find it impossible to estimate costs of a trade beforehand, so my calculation before doing a trade is merely guessing..
What I do is i.e. if i go long i calculate the difference of the USD amount in the wallet to the amount before the trade, so i approximately know how much positive p/l i need to close the position at 0...
-I dont get why bitfinex-price and bitstamp-price is mixed in the order book. many times there is a good bitstamp-price, but a not so good bitfinex price in front of it, so the trade i want to make is blocked. many times one has to wait for the bitfinex orders to be filled to get the bitstamp price - i wonder if its just showing the order amount of bitfinex traders that acutally want the bitstamp price?
-I think p/l and order book is out of sync. after the order book refreshes the calculation of p/l is only done some time after that. so you get the p/l of the last order book refresh or so
-sometimes when closing an open position (button "close all") on the margin-trade-page, the site reloads into the exchange-page. beware not to press buy or sell right after that reload
-no bitfinex-price-charts - as there are no bitfinex-price charts, including bitfinex prices in the margin trade is completely senseless to me - i want to trade bitstamp only
-trailing-stop <1.5 price distance doesnt seem to work. if i enter a distance <1.5 the actual distance is anything but what i entered
-history is awful to calculate your gains/losses- there are three rows of +/- sums on USD and BTC and besides from just comparing wallets before/after a trade i cant caluculate anything with this reliably as it doesnt show WHY that position is noted (short,long etc). maybe its that i just hate book-keeping-way of doing calculations. also its useles as csv as everything is mixed up, you cant just sum up one table to know your overall gain/loss.
-the new interface (bitfinex.com) seems not to have a link to the history as on classic.bitfinex.com ?
-route order/hide order - no idea what that really means..
-on the margin trade page there is an order book. ok with that. below that there is a field "aks" with a triangle and a price and another field "Bid" with a triangle. Both showing a price. most of the time this price has nothing to do with the order book, so whats that about?
-"Your indicative rate" is shown as rate/365, on the lending page the rate is shown as rate per 365 days - not useful at all.
-what i would very much like to have is a function "trailing stop that decreases distance as long as p/l is growing". so one could enter a position with a trailing stop of i.e. 3. and as soon as the p/l grows, the distance gets decreased bit by bit, reaching zero, if a certain price is reached, though mutating the trailing stop into a stop limit. what do you think?
-if you see a price in bitstamp always wait for the next order-book refresh on bitfinex, its not really in sync, so if you make an order and if during the time until the order is placed, the order book refreshes you of course get the new price (or depending on order amount of course).
-comma is displayed as dot - ok, but would be nice to have a comma be a comma (maybe as an option: "european style values" ..) maybe its because values are calculated as float
(definitely values are rounded in some tables and not rounded in others, quite annoying sometimes)
so long
