On stagnant trader only days.........

[MatTheCat]

On stagnant trader only days like today, it becomes increasingly obvious that Bitcoin exchanges are corrupt places.

Been watching the trading and trying to partake in a few trades on Bitfinex and I can tell you, it is not like playing a market, but like playing a fruit machine that is designed to ensure that the player loses money.

It is a game of sweep up the margin calls on there today complete with monster liar walls pushing lemming bids up and down the few fractions of a percent required to push people out of their positions and empty a few dollars more into the exchange koffers.

Of course, it may not be exchange insiders who are tipping margin calls into their pockets, but I would suggest that if someone was going to place 500 strong liar walls (it was a 250 liar wall to begin with but that wasn't scary enough, the 500 BTC liar wall was) on the Bid side, in order to scare people out of their positions, I would suggest it would be a much comfortable experience for them if they had inside access to exchange activity in order to both be reassured that no whale was going to smash a shit load of coin into their wall, and to know where the margin tipping points are likely to be, in order that their bot can properly evaluate risk v reward.

Bitfinex has felt today like there was just me and a handful of others playing around with a bit of money, having the system sweeping the market this way and that, which ever direction resulted in most people being squeezed out their positions.

Lesson learned. Only trade in a market where the momentum is such that it is too dangerous for the house cheats to try and cheat you.

I dont give a rats ass what anyone says.....most of these Bitcoin exchanges are corrupt to one extent or another.

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[Ibian]

Don't you ever get tired of yammering on about that?

[Undone]

Want to swim with sharks and wrestle with vipers? Trade Bitfinex!

[ElectricMucus]

Just stop using leverage, everybody has warned you about it. When the market is stagnant do something else.

[MoreFun]

How do you trade if a few dollars move will put you out of your position?

Anyway there are also market makers and heard also about price stabilizators with big wals on both sides.

[MatTheCat]

Don't you ever get tired of yammering on about that?

No. If it is going on, which it probably is, then it should be repeated often.

Another 500 strong liar wall pushing the bids up as I speak, so I guess their must be net short positions on Bitfinex at the moment.

Is it even 500 BTC?

Or is it just a magical 500 number that will vanish the very first sign of it being traded into?

How do you trade if a few dollars move will put you out of your position?

Anyway there are also market makers and heard also about price stabilizators with big wals on both sides.

Yeah...I remember those massive cliff faces on each side of the bidding wall on Stamp, around the time of the NY hearings on Bitcoin.

Just stop using leverage, everybody has warned you about it. When the market is stagnant do something else.

Meh...lost a few pennies....just pisses me off when I see that these trading places are obviously being tampered with in a way that they shouldn't. Exchange outsiders playing a very risky game just in order to sweep a few coins more into their wallets, or exchange insiders who know for sure that the odds are stacked heavily in their favour?

[MoreFun]

I have seen them two days ago on bitfinex or stamp. They were Opened at the same time.

[MatTheCat]

I have seen them two days ago on bitfinex or stamp. They were Opened at the same time.

A lot of Bitfinex trades are routed through Stamp at a dollar or two below the Bitfinex spot price. i.e. If a Bitfinex order is triggered on Stamp, Bitfinex will give the trader a price of say $665, although the order would have went through Stamp at $663.50 or something like that.

[ElectricMucus]

Meh...lost a few pennies....just pisses me off when I see that these trading places are obviously being tampered with in a way that they shouldn't. Exchange outsiders playing a very risky game just in order to sweep a few coins more into their wallets, or exchange insiders who know for sure that the odds are stacked heavily in their favour?

Sorry to bring it up,
You are at the "anger" phase of the phases of grief, when you reach the acceptance phase you either:

Get a forex account on a reputable broker and get your leverage fix there
and/or
Trade bitcoins the old fashioned way.

[MoreFun]

I have seen them two days ago on bitfinex or stamp. They were Opened at the same time.

A lot of Bitfinex trades are routed through Stamp at a dollar or two below the Bitfinex spot price. i.e. If a Bitfinex order is triggered on Stamp, Bitfinex will give the trader a price of say $665, although the order would have went through Stamp at $663.50 or something like that.

I was talking about bid and ask wall of a similar size at the same time - not on both exchanges.

[Dalmar]

Don't overtrade. I reserve margin trading mainly for breaking news, otherwise you will just get fucked by sharks.

[MatTheCat]

Don't overtrade. I reserve margin trading mainly for breaking news, otherwise you will just get fucked by sharks.

I know this and should know better. But as with my complete recognition and acknowledgement that impulsively made trading decisions will nearly always go against you, I just don't fucking learn.

Of course, trade on dead days and you will be fucked by sharks who have the weight to tease the market in one direction and then boss it in another. But, from the action that I am witnessing I strongly suspect that the market movers are what might be termed as exchange insiders. This would be a dangerous game to play unless someone had assurances that they could avoid any prospect of some whale dropping a shit ton of coin right into their liar BTC bid '(if it is even BTC at all and not just exchange allocated credits).

[segeln]

I just don't fucking learn.

Bonus vir semper tiro

[edok]

The answer is hodl.

[cosmofly]

Full manipulation markets are exaushted no fresh cash

[Torque]

Yeah, God forbid that the price of bitcoin actually stabilizes so it can be used as a viable currency.  Who would actually want that anyway. 

/sarcasm

[MatTheCat]

Yeah, God forbid that the price of bitcoin actually stabilizes so it can be used as a viable currency.  Who would actually want that anyway.  

/sarcasm

Only:

Off Radar Money Changers
Black Market Participants
Attention Seekers

and the damn fucking greedy give two hoots about Bitcoin.

If it isn't turning a nominal USD profit then it will get sold off. What we have is not a stable market. But greedy bastards holding out waiting on another big price surge. If it doesn't kick in, then increasing amounts of Bitcoin will start hitting the market and it will go down in value, right down to where the greedy with a longer term outlook think it is a good price, but they too have a tolerance thershold which will be broken if Bitcoin doesn't rise in value and turn them a buck. Don't be fooled by the Bitcoin idealists. All of them early adopters to a man. It's easy to be idealistic when you are 10000% up, perhaps not so easy when you are one of the unfortunates who was convinced by Bitcoin Nutter to go all in at $800, and that is if you didn't exit the market in the $500s, which you probably did.

If Bitcoin is not going up in value, then it must go down in value. Aside from appreciating in value, Bitcoin has no use to 90% of those holding it.

[HairyMaclairy]

Yeah, God forbid that the price of bitcoin actually stabilizes so it can be used as a viable currency.  Who would actually want that anyway.  

/sarcasm

I would prefer it not stabilise at $ 666. Something higher would be nice.

[MatTheCat]

Yeah, God forbid that the price of bitcoin actually stabilizes so it can be used as a viable currency.  Who would actually want that anyway. 

/sarcasm

I would prefer it not stabilise at $ 666

Bitcoin likes $666.

Crypto-spawn of Satan.

[TERA]

OP's mistake lies in the title of the thread. Why are you trading on stagnant days? I only like to trade during volatility+volume.

[Zule]

I agree with the OP, it seems to me that when a micro trend gains momentum, market makers absorb it just to reverse the natural wave movement. I even went along and bought when it looked as if its time to panic sell and vice versa, ultra small amounts, just for fun. Better results than rational trading i tell you, but its mind blowing to watch.

[gog1]

what kind of a move, percentage wise, is needed to trigger margin call assuming you are fully leveraged?

[bitcoinlitcoinbtcltc]

I fully agree with you OP!

Just SECONDS before BTCChina announced adding litecoin, a whale put in a massive buy order for litecoin at 14.5 and sold around 19 on BTC-e.

Everyone saying that bitcoin is revolutionary because it is controlled ''by us'' is a fool. It is controlled, but not by the federal reserves, just some other dudes who entered early and now have some sort of a monopoly on bitcoin.

You think USD is not equally distributed? Ha, bitcoin is even worse!
The top 1% of bitcoin holders, holds more of the overall supply of bitcoins than the top 1% of USD holders hold the overall supply of USD.

And on top of that, bitcoin is a great currency for criminals. Anyone in Africa could open a good looking webstore and accept bitcoins.
Heck, he could make some sort of a program and opens 1000 stores in a few weeks and start accepting bitcoins without ever bothering about supply, demand, stock, customers, returns, etc. People will find some of his stores on google and buy. He might earn 1 btc with those 1000 stores combined, but that's thousands of customers being scammed every month. By 1 African somewhere in Nigeria.

[MatTheCat]

what kind of a move, percentage wise, is needed to trigger margin call assuming you are fully leveraged?

Depends on tolerance of the trader.

But say u have 10K, and u leverage 2.5:1, you can then trade with 25K worth of BTC. This means that a $10 in the wrong direction can end hitting you around $500, and then there also seems to be more ass-fucking on top of that with Bitfinex, such as sell - orders going well beyond the price that you had set to sell at etc....

So from the exchanges point of view, it is probably a very lucrative business to have a bot that sweeps up all those mis-placed bets during low volume stagnant periods. If you know where the weight of the bets are placed, it is easy to instigate a little trading action that will squeeze leverage users out of short and long positions. If the majority are short (cos that it what TA 101 tells them to do, then drive the market up, if they are long, then smack it down a bit).

I was personally challenged on this forum by one of the Bitfinex exchange team/owners for stating these suspicions previously. But I don't give a fuk. I think they are corrupt. We now know for sure that Karpeles was at it and it and in all likelihood, they are at it on all exchanges to some extent. No regulation, no oversight, daily temptation to make serious sums of money by rigging the game, just a little, and then perhaps a little bit  more. They have access to privileged market knowledge, they know to what extent they can use their fractional reserve Bitcoin systems to push real Bitcoin's into their koffers without risking market movements leaving them 'negative Bitcoin'. Not so obvious when market is moving. When market is stagnant it is downright blatant what is going on.

This is why I generally don't trade with Stop Losses. Too many times have I come to my PC and seen my stop loss triggered right at the very tip of an erratic spike and then the market progress to put my trade well into the green, if I hadn't been cheated out of it already. This will likely explain why BTC-e and Bitfinex are generally more volatile or noisy than Bitstamp. The 'noise' is all the leveraged stop losses getting wiped out.

Just SECONDS before BTCChina announced adding litecoin, a whale put in a massive buy order for litecoin at 14.5 and sold around 19 on BTC-e.

Everyone saying that bitcoin is revolutionary because it is controlled ''by us'' is a fool. It is controlled, but not by the federal reserves, just some other dudes who entered early and now have some sort of a monopoly on bitcoin.

Probably. Anyone involved in the operating and running of an exchange, is more likely than not a crypto-currency whale.....Painting the tape?  Front-running? Price fixing with fake volume? Oh no, these guys would never do that. It is only nasty bankers in the dirty fiat financial world that get up to such underhand dirty tricks. Bitcoin is the money of liberty and freedom.

[TERA]

what kind of a move, percentage wise, is needed to trigger margin call assuming you are fully leveraged?

It depends what your level of leverage is on Bitfinex, and whether you "cheat" the leverage by borrowing against bitcoin instead of usd. Most people have 2.5 to 1 to leverage, and you can cheat this by exchanging to bitcoins first and then borrowing against your bitcoins, so that your leverage is 3.5 to 1. I will assume the cheating case since you asked "fully leveraged". Also the margin requirement for someone using this leverage is 13%, meaning you need to maintain an account value equal to at least 13% of the USD that you borrowed.

Let's say my account value was $600 and I bought a bitcoin for $600, then I leveraged an additional 2.5 bitcoins in a margin position on top of that. That means I borrowed $1500. In order to stay alive, I need to maintain an account balance (including unrealized gain/loss), of $1500 * 13/100 = $195. $195 is the neccessary net value collateral (or "margin") that bitfinex needs at all times to make sure they can quickly close my position if I start approaching the red on my account value. If it goes below $195, I am liquidated.

For every dollar that bitcoin goes down, I lose $3.5 of my account value. That is because my 1 real bitcoin is losing $1 of value and my 2.5 of leveraged bitcoins are causing a $2.5 unrealized loss. I will do a calculation to find the amount of loss that I need to reach $195.

$600 - $3.5*x = $195.
3.5x = $405
x = $115.714...

The price needed to drop $115.714 for me to be liquidated.

That makes my liquidation price $600-115.714 = $484.286
Bitfinex always shows this liquidation price next to your leveraged position, though I'm not sure if it's calculated properly in real time when you're "cheating".

The percentage move is $115.714/$600

= 19.2%

[stylin]

If Bitcoin is not going up in value, then it must go down in value.

"Hurr durr Bitcoin has to do what I say!! Otherwise it is FRAUD and MANIPULATION!! The price is not the REAL price, this is what the price is SUPPOSED to be!!"

No wonder you're losing money to the sharks.

[MatTheCat]

No wonder you're losing money to the sharks.

No wonder you don't have fuck all to lose.

[Torque]

Yeah, God forbid that the price of bitcoin actually stabilizes so it can be used as a viable currency.  Who would actually want that anyway.  

/sarcasm

Only:

Off Radar Money Changers
Black Market Participants
Attention Seekers

and the damn fucking greedy give two hoots about Bitcoin.

If it isn't turning a nominal USD profit then it will get sold off. What we have is not a stable market. But greedy bastards holding out waiting on another big price surge. If it doesn't kick in, then increasing amounts of Bitcoin will start hitting the market and it will go down in value, right down to where the greedy with a longer term outlook think it is a good price, but they too have a tolerance thershold which will be broken if Bitcoin doesn't rise in value and turn them a buck. Don't be fooled by the Bitcoin idealists. All of them early adopters to a man. It's easy to be idealistic when you are 10000% up, perhaps not so easy when you are one of the unfortunates who was convinced by Bitcoin Nutter to go all in at $800, and that is if you didn't exit the market in the $500s, which you probably did.

If Bitcoin is not going up in value, then it must go down in value. Aside from appreciating in value, Bitcoin has no use to 90% of those holding it.

I'm not a Bitcoin Nutter as you say, but I am long on bitcoin's future.  Matt, I actually think it'll be around a lot longer than you will, lol.  Or you'll probably still be around a few years from now, somehow trying to make a few bucks on it's ups and downs.

I mean if Bitcoin never makes it as a viable and stable currency in the long term, then NO CRYPTOCURRENCY will ever make it.  And the price has to go WAY up from here before it can stabilize.  To the point where the sharks and the market makers no longer control the market, because instead it'll reside with the masses.

Actually, I first bought at $400's (during the Nov rise), but continued buying as it went up.  Even bought a few at 1000.  But then sold 35% of my holdings at $850, and then bought them all back at $510.  So overall, I think I'm doing pretty well.  The only mistake I really made was not selling them all when the price hit 1100, but then again I was a bitcoin newb and hindsight is always 20/20.

[Yololintian]

Yeah, God forbid that the price of bitcoin actually stabilizes so it can be used as a viable currency.  Who would actually want that anyway. 

/sarcasm

Only:

Off Radar Money Changers
Black Market Participants
Attention Seekers

and the damn fucking greedy give two hoots about Bitcoin.

If it isn't turning a nominal USD profit then it will get sold off. What we have is not a stable market. But greedy bastards holding out waiting on another big price surge. If it doesn't kick in, then increasing amounts of Bitcoin will start hitting the market and it will go down in value, right down to where the greedy with a longer term outlook think it is a good price, but they too have a tolerance thershold which will be broken if Bitcoin doesn't rise in value and turn them a buck. Don't be fooled by the Bitcoin idealists. All of them early adopters to a man. It's easy to be idealistic when you are 10000% up, perhaps not so easy when you are one of the unfortunates who was convinced by Bitcoin Nutter to go all in at $800, and that is if you didn't exit the market in the $500s, which you probably did.

If Bitcoin is not going up in value, then it must go down in value. Aside from appreciating in value, Bitcoin has no use to 90% of those holding it.

I'm not a Bitcoin Nutter as you say, but I am long on bitcoin's future.  Matt, I actually think it'll be around a lot longer than you will, lol.  Or you'll probably still be around a few years from now, somehow trying to make a few bucks on it's ups and downs.

I mean if Bitcoin never makes it as a viable and stable currency in the long term, then NO CRYPTOCURRENCY will ever make it.  And the price has to go WAY up from here before it can stabilize.  To the point where the sharks and the market makers no longer control the market, because instead it'll reside with the masses.

Actually, I first bought at $400's (during the Nov rise), but continued buying as it went up.  Even bought a few at 1000.  But then sold 35% of my holdings at $850, and then bought them all back at $510.  So overall, I think I'm doing pretty well.  The only mistake I really made was not selling them all when the price hit 1100, but then again I was a bitcoin newb and hindsight is always 20/20.

Bitcoin can easily fail where other cryptocurrencies can succeed based on the fact that it is deflationary. That fact may cause it to never be a stable currency. Also I'm not familiar with the technical aspects of the technology but I can see how there could, in the future, be a technical problem with bitcoin that is solved by another crypto. Do you really think that if bitcoin fails, all cryptos will fail?

[Siegfried]

what kind of a move, percentage wise, is needed to trigger margin call assuming you are fully leveraged?

Depends on tolerance of the trader.

But say u have 10K, and u leverage 2.5:1, you can then trade with 25K worth of BTC. This means that a $10 in the wrong direction can end hitting you around $500, and then there also seems to be more ass-fucking on top of that with Bitfinex, such as sell - orders going well beyond the price that you had set to sell at etc....

So from the exchanges point of view, it is probably a very lucrative business to have a bot that sweeps up all those mis-placed bets during low volume stagnant periods. If you know where the weight of the bets are placed, it is easy to instigate a little trading action that will squeeze leverage users out of short and long positions. If the majority are short (cos that it what TA 101 tells them to do, then drive the market up, if they are long, then smack it down a bit).

I was personally challenged on this forum by one of the Bitfinex exchange team/owners for stating these suspicions previously. But I don't give a fuk. I think they are corrupt. We now know for sure that Karpeles was at it and it and in all likelihood, they are at it on all exchanges to some extent. No regulation, no oversight, daily temptation to make serious sums of money by rigging the game, just a little, and then perhaps a little bit  more. They have access to privileged market knowledge, they know to what extent they can use their fractional reserve Bitcoin systems to push real Bitcoin's into their koffers without risking market movements leaving them 'negative Bitcoin'. Not so obvious when market is moving. When market is stagnant it is downright blatant what is going on.

This is why I generally don't trade with Stop Losses. Too many times have I come to my PC and seen my stop loss triggered right at the very tip of an erratic spike and then the market progress to put my trade well into the green, if I hadn't been cheated out of it already. This will likely explain why BTC-e and Bitfinex are generally more volatile or noisy than Bitstamp. The 'noise' is all the leveraged stop losses getting wiped out.

Just SECONDS before BTCChina announced adding litecoin, a whale put in a massive buy order for litecoin at 14.5 and sold around 19 on BTC-e.

Everyone saying that bitcoin is revolutionary because it is controlled ''by us'' is a fool. It is controlled, but not by the federal reserves, just some other dudes who entered early and now have some sort of a monopoly on bitcoin.

Probably. Anyone involved in the operating and running of an exchange, is more likely than not a crypto-currency whale.....Painting the tape?  Front-running? Price fixing with fake volume? Oh no, these guys would never do that. It is only nasty bankers in the dirty fiat financial world that get up to such underhand dirty tricks. Bitcoin is the money of liberty and freedom.

I think you are right. That is why normal people without those unfair advantages should only use exchanges to move out of fiat and into bitcoin. Once people have bitcoin, they should use it as a long-term store of value or as a currency to buy things.

[TERA]

"stagnant trader day" = oxymoron

[gog1]

what kind of a move, percentage wise, is needed to trigger margin call assuming you are fully leveraged?

It depends what your level of leverage is on Bitfinex, and whether you "cheat" the leverage by borrowing against bitcoin instead of usd. Most people have 2.5 to 1 to leverage, and you can cheat this by exchanging to bitcoins first and then borrowing against your bitcoins, so that your leverage is 3.5 to 1. I will assume the cheating case since you asked "fully leveraged". Also the margin requirement for someone using this leverage is 13%, meaning you need to maintain an account value equal to at least 13% of the USD that you borrowed.

Let's say my account value was $600 and I bought a bitcoin for $600, then I leveraged an additional 2.5 bitcoins in a margin position on top of that. That means I borrowed $1500. In order to stay alive, I need to maintain an account balance (including unrealized gain/loss), of $1500 * 13/100 = $195. $195 is the neccessary net value collateral (or "margin") that bitfinex needs at all times to make sure they can quickly close my position if I start approaching the red on my account value. If it goes below $195, I am liquidated.

For every dollar that bitcoin goes down, I lose $3.5 of my account value. That is because my 1 real bitcoin is losing $1 of value and my 2.5 of leveraged bitcoins are causing a $2.5 unrealized loss. I will do a calculation to find the amount of loss that I need to reach $195.

$600 - $3.5*x = $195.
3.5x = $405
x = $115.714...

The price needed to drop $115.714 for me to be liquidated.

That makes my liquidation price $600-115.714 = $484.286
Bitfinex always shows this liquidation price next to your leveraged position, though I'm not sure if it's calculated properly in real time when you're "cheating".

The percentage move is $115.714/$600

= 19.2%

I know a lot have happened, but it seems bitcoin "stabilized" a lot and it's not easy to hit the 20% threshold to get forced liquidation.

[Ibian]

Yeah, God forbid that the price of bitcoin actually stabilizes so it can be used as a viable currency.  Who would actually want that anyway. 

/sarcasm

Not me. It would mean that bitcoin has failed. We are at less than a tenth of one percent of adoption right now.

[stylin]

Yeah, God forbid that the price of bitcoin actually stabilizes so it can be used as a viable currency.  Who would actually want that anyway. 

/sarcasm

Not me. It would mean that bitcoin has failed. We are at less than a tenth of one percent of adoption right now.

The level of adoption needed to be considered "successful" is subjective. All you need is enough people using Bitcoin in order to be able to easily liquidate, you don't need the whole world. For instance, I doubt even 1 in 20 people in the US have gold. Maybe 1 in 10,000 people using Bitcoin, is enough adoption. It doesn't mean Bitcoin has failed if it will always be used by a niche group.

[Ibian]

Yeah, God forbid that the price of bitcoin actually stabilizes so it can be used as a viable currency.  Who would actually want that anyway.  

/sarcasm

Not me. It would mean that bitcoin has failed. We are at less than a tenth of one percent of adoption right now.

The level of adoption needed to be considered "successful" is subjective. All you need is enough people using Bitcoin in order to be able to easily liquidate, you don't need the whole world. For instance, I doubt even 1 in 20 people in the US have gold. Maybe 1 in 10,000 people using Bitcoin, is enough adoption. It doesn't mean Bitcoin has failed if it will always be used by a niche group.

Bitcoin is not gold. It also is not money. It's gold, money, and paypal all rolled into one with the added bonus of not having to trust a third party. If bitoin doesn't reach at least the average valuation of those three, plus something extra for not having to trust strangers with your coins, it will have failed because it is worth so much more.