ICBIT Derivatives Market (USD/BTC futures trading) - LIVE

[Fireball]

I.e. I open two positions with 10 BTC margin, one short and one long.  The market moves significantly, one way or the other.  One account gains 20 BTC, the other would have lost 20 BTC but the loss is limited to 10 BTC by available funding.  Net gain 10 BTC.  That gain has to come from someone, either ICBIT if the account was allowed to go negative, or from other traders' profit if there is worst-case closure.

As long as one short and one long - they are market neutral, and one account gain would equal other account loss. By the moment one of the accounts reaches critical limit (75% of the reserved amount), margin call happens and amount of open positions gets reduced by usual market orders down to 0 in extreme case. And that person leaves the "market neutral" state. Noone gets cheated, it's quite normal.

That is the rules of the game as stated on the web page, and I have no problem with that - at least not if it happens rapidly, i.e. that I loose the last day or last few days of profit. But I would be very unhappy if this happens at a much later time (for example at settlement) and that I loose weeks of profit, killing my own margin account.

Are my expectations approximately correct?

Absolutely. Dragging these kind of issues till the settlement would just make it worse and provide false expectations. When profitable position gets reduced, a trader always has the option to re-open the contracts by current market price and, hopefully, continue getting profits. When it's delayed till settlement, he thinks everything is allright and does not doanything, and suddenly realizes that he can't get full profit. That's why we compensated all losses on the previous settlement of BUZ2 contract (thus spending all fees we've got from trading), so that noone felt offended and got their profits in full.

[Fireball]

Speaking about high spreads, Mt.Gox currently has $0.7 spread.

Really it's nearly impossible to do any arbitrage with Mt.Gox's connection today, so sorry about lack of asks in the futures. Hence, I'm going to do some improvements to the Exchange market too, so that both Futures and Exchange (spot) markets would work on ICBIT, allowing for better arbitrage and hedging opportunities. Working with greatly unreliable Mt.Gox's connection is a pain.

[picobit]

Fireball: Thanks for your clear answer to my questions.

These market conditions must be a kind of stress test for ICBIT 

[Fireball]

Fireball: Thanks for your clear answer to my questions.

These market conditions must be a kind of stress test for ICBIT 

Oh yes, that's a good test. New people came, and platform usage was about a few times more than usually.

[Fireball]

I just deployed a minor update (it doesn't change anything visually), which reorganized javascript code used by the trading platform, reducing number of retrieved .js files and also minifying them.

If something breaks after this one: please reload your browser, if it still doesn't help - clear the cache and reload again, if it still doesn't help - please report here

[Stephen Gornick]

If something breaks after this one: please reload your browser, if it still doesn't help - clear the cache and reload again, if it still doesn't help - please report here

In Chrome/Chromium when I click on the Market Depth chart it moves (like a scroll down) but no chart displays.

[Edit: as segabtc reports, nearly no data is displaying, not just this depth chart issue.]

[segabtc]

I just deployed a minor update (it doesn't change anything visually), which reorganized javascript code used by the trading platform, reducing number of retrieved .js files and also minifying them.

If something breaks after this one: please reload your browser, if it still doesn't help - clear the cache and reload again, if it still doesn't help - please report here

Latest FF browser, just updated, cleared cache and still can't see orderbook and balances windows. thanks

[picobit]

I just deployed a minor update (it doesn't change anything visually), which reorganized javascript code used by the trading platform, reducing number of retrieved .js files and also minifying them.

If something breaks after this one: please reload your browser, if it still doesn't help - clear the cache and reload again, if it still doesn't help - please report here

Safari, cleared cashe and reloaded.  Cannot see orderbook and balances.

[molecular]

I just deployed a minor update (it doesn't change anything visually), which reorganized javascript code used by the trading platform, reducing number of retrieved .js files and also minifying them.

If something breaks after this one: please reload your browser, if it still doesn't help - clear the cache and reload again, if it still doesn't help - please report here

Safari, cleared cashe and reloaded.  Cannot see orderbook and balances.

all my stuff is gone. orders, bitcoins, positions.

[Fireball]

Hm, indeed, first rule of every developer - never say "it should work", because it won't then

The thing is that API server became inacessible. The error was tracked down and will be fixed, in the meanwhile it's running as it should.

[picobit]

There seems to be something wrong with the clearing price for futures with no trading volume in the last 24h.  For more than 24h the gold order book has had asks all the way down to the lower limit of the trading range (33.3 BTC/oz).  But since that is apparently still too high a price for gold, no-one buys and the "last" price remains the same.  Clearly, this is because the trading range is too high, and it should center around the lowest ask price when there are no bids.  

Something similar is happening with BUU3, where the bid side is full almost to the top of the allowed range, and the range does not move because no-one wants to sell to these apparently too low prices.


EDIT: The problem seems to have solved itself for the gold futures at least.  Somebody bought at the lowest ask price, and the price is now free to move again.

[Fireball]

There seems to be something wrong with the clearing price for futures with no trading volume in the last 24h.  For more than 24h the gold order book has had asks all the way down to the lower limit of the trading range (33.3 BTC/oz).  But since that is apparently still too high a price for gold, no-one buys and the "last" price remains the same.  Clearly, this is because the trading range is too high, and it should center around the lowest ask price when there are no bids.  

Something similar is happening with BUU3, where the bid side is full almost to the top of the allowed range, and the range does not move because no-one wants to sell to these apparently too low prices.


EDIT: The problem seems to have solved itself for the gold futures at least.  Somebody bought at the lowest ask price, and the price is now free to move again.

Thanks, I will check this.

[xeverse]

Why do you charge any fees if you can do marketmaking?
Because of such fees it's not possible to hold any descent spread..

More so having such access to the realtime database of all trades it would be possible to predict the market
or at the very least to see it from the other side (but options stats maybe required along with futures for that)..

[Fireball]

Why do you charge any fees if you can do marketmaking?
Because of such fees it's not possible to hold any descent spread..

Everyone can do market making, it's an open market. As of now, the kind of market making I do doesn't lead to any income.

However, what I'm going to propose soon is reduced fees for market makers, so that the spread narrows down significantly. As usual, majority of futures exchanges offer special fees for liquidity providers. We'll do so too soon.

I'm just finishing another update (considered major this time) to client trading platform code, which will allow many new possibilities.

[TobyGoodwin]

I'm sure this is due to my misunderstanding, but icbit isn't doing what I'd expect. I made an entry order on the Exchange screen, to sell 1 BTC at $47.9. The price passed this a couple of hours ago, according to the candlestick chart, but the order hasn't been executed. Here's a screenshot.

http://mb.tobold.org/icbit.png

I'm wondering if the chart shows Ask or Bid prices? And how can I choose which to show? And what's the spread? Oh, and what does the blue "L" next to my order in the orderbook mean?

All clues gratefully received!

Thanks, Toby.

[starik69]

I suppose this chart is from mtgox and placed here as illustration.

[Fireball]

All clues gratefully received!

Thanks, Toby.

Toby, this is indeed because chart is informational only.
I'm working on a series of major updates to the trading interface, which will improve both Futures and Exchange market, and one of the things to be introduced is the real-time chart showing ICBIT prices, recent trades log, etc etc.
ETA for deployment - this week.

[Fireball]

I just deployed a major update to the system. As usual please reload your browsers, clear cache if necessary, and try it out.
You will notice some goods things for sure, but to help you a bit:
- Further consolidation and minification of the client-side javascript code. Less files, less size, faster page loading time
- Orders are now submitted using the api channel + clientside javascript, which is about a magnitude faster than previously using page request and server-side processing. Just try to put some orders and you are going to feel they are there instantly
- Notifications are much prettier now (try to enter orders and see how they work)
- If the order is rejected by the server, the reason for rejection is going to be displayed in the status column

Additionally:
- JQuery updated to 1.7.2
- Now trading API allows to specify custom token (a number) when submitting an order create command. This may help you track orders in the algotrading systems
- Thorough testing of the API for extreme cases was performed (overflow/etc)
- Various minor improvements to the Exchange market. It's nearly ready to be jumpstarted

[Stephen Gornick]

Yeah, this maybe problematic. As the exchange grows (it's still very very small compared to e.g. MtGox), this problem would not be so important because of bigger quantity of bids/asks.

I just read about 1Broker closing its BTC/USD market:

A user successfully demonstrated the possibility to win constantly on our platform by moving the underlying market. This problem was known but thought to be not profitable because of position limits, market fees, and spreads.

- https://1broker.com/?c=news&newsid=5

ICBIT stands without much competition for selling Bitcoin short.

[Stephen Gornick]

I just deployed a major update to the system. As usual please reload your browsers, clear cache if necessary, and try it out.

Status shows "Trading"  but no data shows, except for charts.  [Resolved]