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

[Fireball]

But instead of executing my order immediately at the current best bid price (about 11.29) it looks like my order was executed at (my very low, mistaken limit price) of 10.579.

Please take a look and let me know if I am understanding the logs wrong.

You understood it right, that was the problem which was fixed. It happened only for sell orders, so all buy orders were correct anyway.

As for the orderbook 5 price levels limit - we are thinking on how to better place the orderbook on the trading screen and it'll be enhanced to contain more price levels once redesign is figured out.

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[picobit]

As for the orderbook 5 price levels limit - we are thinking on how to better place the orderbook on the trading screen and it'll be enhanced to contain more price levels once redesign is figured out.

I don't think this should wait for a redesign.  It would be very, very useful if you could just place a link on the page to a separate page displaying the full order book. It does not need to be something fancy that autoupdates, initially just an ugly page showing a snapshot would be great.  We really need it!

EDIT:

PS. Did you pull the internet plug a few minutes before the clearing to prevent the usual market manipulation, or was is just me that lost connection for a few minutes at the critical time?

[Fireball]

I don't think this should wait for a redesign.  It would be very, very useful if you could just place a link on the page to a separate page displaying the full order book. It does not need to be something fancy that autoupdates, initially just an ugly page showing a snapshot would be great.  We really need it!

Allright, tomorrow I'll add it some way or another.

EDIT:

PS. Did you pull the internet plug a few minutes before the clearing to prevent the usual market manipulation, or was is just me that lost connection for a few minutes at the critical time?

No, it worked for me quite good during that time.

[picobit]

Allright, tomorrow I'll add it some way or another.

Thank you very much indeed.

No, it worked for me quite good during that time.

OK, it would have been an almost sensible thing to do, but I guess it was just a fluke - or perhaps the server gets a bit overloaded right then, when the majority of the users are on at the same time, refreshing their pages expecting to see some action. 

[Stephen Gornick]

Looks like someone is hammering it right @ clearing time? Really, in the last seconds or so.

Heh, that continues again and again.

Best way to buy is have some low bids in right before clearing.  Someone must feel it is better to sell a few BUZ2's right before clearing and lower the clearing price than to take the hit from a higher clearing price? (and possibly risk having their position involuntarily liquidated?)

[Fireball]

Heh, that continues again and again.

Best way to buy is have some low bids in right before clearing.  Someone must feel it is better to sell a few BUZ2's right before clearing and lower the clearing price than to take the hit from a higher clearing price? (and possibly risk having their position involuntarily liquidated?)

I'm providing some liquidity to the market to narrow down the spread. This also helps stabilizing price before a clearing.

[Stephen Gornick]

the futures trading chart will be live quite soon so everyone could see historical data

Well, not everyone ... only people who have registered with ICBIT and are logged in can see the charts.

These are beautiful.  




There are traders who would be attracted to BUZ2 because for it provides the ability to hedge but they aren't even aware of this trading opportunity.

You should consider a way to serve the chart (and order book) for guest access (i.e., not logged in).

[Fireball]

There are traders who would be attracted to BUZ2 because for it provides the ability to hedge but they aren't even aware of this trading opportunity.

You should consider a way to serve the chart (and order book) for guest access (i.e., not logged in).

I think we can arrange publishing of this information through bitcoincharts.com

[picobit]

I don't think this should wait for a redesign.  It would be very, very useful if you could just place a link on the page to a separate page displaying the full order book. It does not need to be something fancy that autoupdates, initially just an ugly page showing a snapshot would be great.  We really need it!

Allright, tomorrow I'll add it some way or another.

Is there any hope of seeing this anytime soon.  The other day I refrained from trading because I couldn't see what I was doing due to a row of tiny, very close bids.

[DeepBit]

Is there any hope of seeing this anytime soon.  The other day I refrained from trading because I couldn't see what I was doing due to a row of tiny, very close bids.

Depth graph is planned. Hope to see it soon too.

[Fireball]

For those who run their trading bots: order book message json object format will change today (to make it arbitrary sized into both sides and to simplify parsing on the client side), so don't forget to look at the new json object and adapt your code.

[Fireball]

Is there any hope of seeing this anytime soon.  The other day I refrained from trading because I couldn't see what I was doing due to a row of tiny, very close bids.

Allright, I just added a way to change orderbook window size (it's same way how you change size of "your orders" window at the bottom, by clicking a small blue arrow pointing downwards). Instead of 5 entries in every direction you could see 11 now.

It's not a totally proper solution because it's possible to fill up those 11 entries (or any more) too, if one wants to.
The depth of market chart would provide a much better overview, when it's done.

[Ichthyo]

Allright, I just added a way to change orderbook window size (it's same way how you change size of "your orders" window at the bottom, by clicking a small blue arrow pointing downwards). Instead of 5 entries in every direction you could see 11 now.

this is already a valuable improvement, very much apreciated!


...looking ahead to the maket depth graph.
Incidentally, wouldn't it be possible to publish the futures data through bitcoinchars? Or is that limited to classical BTC/currency exchanges?

[DeepBit]

...looking ahead to the maket depth graph.
Incidentally, wouldn't it be possible to publish the futures data through bitcoinchars? Or is that limited to classical BTC/currency exchanges?

We sent a message to tcatm a couple of days ago, awaiting for his opinion. That would be nice, of course (bitcoincharts also can display market depth on it's own).

[picobit]

Allright, I just added a way to change orderbook window size (it's same way how you change size of "your orders" window at the bottom, by clicking a small blue arrow pointing downwards). Instead of 5 entries in every direction you could see 11 now.

Thanks a lot!  This helps tremendously during normal trading.

It's not a totally proper solution because it's possible to fill up those 11 entries (or any more) too, if one wants to.
The depth of market chart would provide a much better overview, when it's done.

Of course if someone wants to sabotage the overview, they can still do it.  But I suspect that in most cases it will help a lot.

[Ichthyo]

Are the oil futures working as expected?

Yesterday everything was ok-ish, but now the situation there looks queer: the complete Ask side is gone and the displayed rate is at the upper bound of the range allowed for today, which is 8.6872 - 10.6176 -- any existing bids are completely out of this range. How is this "current rate" calculated? The Chart don't give me any clues here.

Does this mean that there actually was a deal done at 10.61 or is this just a fallback picked by the system?
A deal at above 10 looks strange, because this necessarily means that someone acually went long at that rate, which is completely off road. Current market rate should be at 85.80 / 11.05 = 7,76  -- well, futures markets can be in contango (or would this count as backwardation in this case, since we're actually more speculating on bictoin rate movements than on oil rate movements?).

Anyway, the current situation concerns me somewhat, since when there is no ask side, theoretically a single player could just skew the rate up until everyone else is driven into liquidation... 

[Ichthyo]

Are the oil futures working as expected?
Yesterday everything was ok-ish, but now the situation there looks queer....

Today I've observed what's going on.
So my theory what happened is as follows...

• the market isn't especially deep, but looks sort-of balanced
• Fireball (or someone else) is running a market making bot
• this bot had placed an order at the outer borders of the allowed range
• just few minutes before the adjustment cut-off at 20:00 UTC, a manipulator buys away the complete ask side
• since the last offer bought away is the one placed by the market making bot, the system picks the exact upper end of the range as "current rate" and centers the new range at that point
• thus the new range ends up largely outside of any existing offers during that day. Everyone holding positions receives a really huge mark-to-market adjustment

I think this mechanism is very destructive and absolutely not how it's intended to work.
If a manipulator succeds with such a scheme several days in row, he can basically create his own leveraged yield and squeeze all holders of counter positions out, and all of this with relatively low input and moderate risk.

[Ichthyo]

We've continuously ongoing problems with manipulation shortly before the cut-off at 20:00


What do you think of the following proposal?

Instead of using the "current range", which is sensitive to the order of execution and especially sensitive to what happened in the last seconds --
why not using a weighted average of the last day's actual trades? Only if there was zero trading activity, then the weighted average of the orders should be used. So, in any case, the next day's trading range would be centred at the last trading session's centre of activity.

• just placing some orders wouldn't have any effect anymore
• the incentive of last-minute trades would be reduced. At least a manipulator needs to move huge positions
• In case of a crash of the underlying market, the damping effect would be stronger. But since everyone would move to the border of the current trading range, the necessary (but damped) adjustment would still be possible.

Does this proposal make sense, do you see any further problems? Do you think this would ameliorate the issues?

[guruvan]

It would seem that you're onto the right nature of a solution. I'm not sure that changing the range calculation alone achieves the desired result. Perhaps the clearing price should be set with the (volume) weighted avg, and combine that with a weight for proximity to clearing time (really, either before or after, as I see there's a converse behavior of pushing the clearing price in one direction before clearing, and immediately pushing the price in the opposite direction right after clearing).

If the trades right at that time moved the clearing price less than the trades mid-session, there'd be considerably less incentive to try to game it.

[picobit]

The problem with the BTC/Oil and BTC/Gold markets are tiny volumes, that makes them easier to manipulate.  I guess there is some manipulation on the BTC/USD market too, and there Ichthyo's solution would undoubtedly work.  But on the other markets, if there are just a few trades every day it will be susceptible to manipulation.

I wonder if these products have a future.  There is a clear market for the BTC/USD futures, both for speculation and for hedging.  But speculating simultaneously on Oil and BTC prices may be a bit too much, and who needs to hedge the oil price in BTC??