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

[Agent Provocateur]

for your interest, the agent has left stage

[segabtc]

maybe needs to say that within a 5 minutes window of close, closing can occur, and create a random time of closing everyday, but within that 5 minute window, ie 7:55 to 8:00 closing can occur.
that way nobody knows when exactly it is gonna close, so if we get these sellers coming in to help the var nic, the buyers might have a change to stand back up and take a swing at that bear. Cause if we can stop him once and force a close on him, he will be out!!!. Closing his position is just gonna make his losses even worse because they hit open market and take out the sell side,and price goes up. Am I thinking correct?

[Ichthyo]

Cause if we can stop him once and force a close on him, he will be out!!!. Closing his position is just gonna make his losses even worse because they hit open market and take out the sell side,and price goes up. Am I thinking correct?

Basically that seems to have been happengin right now

All the blocking Asks are gone and we're jumping up to 11

[smickles]

woah, icbit logs arn't persistent?
my settlement numbers just changed today
earlier, the close was marked at 10.11897
now that entry is gone
replaced by an entry dated 1.5 hours later, close market at 10.8088

[segabtc]

look at the wall

[Fireball]

Basically that seems to have been happengin right now

All the blocking Asks are gone and we're jumping up to 11

We had to liquidate some percent of clients short positions because of the high risk.

[Fireball]

woah, icbit logs arn't persistent?
my settlement numbers just changed today
earlier, the close was marked at 10.11897
now that entry is gone
replaced by an entry dated 1.5 hours later, close market at 10.8088

No way. It can't happen. You mixed up something. By the nature of the system, everything is logged, settlement prices are written in a database, in incremental order, so they can't be "just altered".

[segabtc]

dump them and drive up that price, heheheh

sorry you do what needs to be done.

[Fireball]

maybe needs to say that within a 5 minutes window of close, closing can occur, and create a random time of closing everyday, but within that 5 minute window, ie 7:55 to 8:00 closing can occur.

I like the suggestion really, it introduces some useful randomness without hurting integrity of financial operations.

[ThePok]

Oh man, someone gone sob oneself to sleep    

[smickles]

woah, icbit logs arn't persistent?
my settlement numbers just changed today
earlier, the close was marked at 10.11897
now that entry is gone
replaced by an entry dated 1.5 hours later, close market at 10.8088

No way. It can't happen. You mixed up something. By the nature of the system, everything is logged, settlement prices are written in a database, in incremental order, so they can't be "just altered".

So I just hallucinated that log entry which I saw at 20:30 UTC and used to report data to several people? </jk>

But seriously, I'm sure I saw a variation margin entry which is not the one currently shown in my logs.

[segabtc]

why thanks, glad you liked the idea, I have been lurking and watching and reading this topic and that is the only way to give the market a chance, to fluctuate is one thing but to be able to game because you have X amount of btc I can dump and drive down anytime I want and closing is occurring in 3, 2, 1, saved the var. and might even made a profit, but it gets in a situation of increasing the dumps to stay ahead. "VERY DANGEROUS". Another answer you gave in a previous reply that I was curious about, Do you close ALL open positions or just enough to cover var.?  Apparently it is covering just what needs to be covered. Thanks for your work.

[Fireball]

is this a nervous bear? or straight up manipulation? can you give a little insight as to what happened, no names or anything, just the facts.

I represent an exchange, so either bull or bear, they are our precious clients. ICBIT treats them equally, and the only task is to reduce risks of either loosing all money (better to loose part, but not all), or the risk of exchange's clearing pool "default".

As a trader... Well. Of course, when you see market going in other direction than you expected, this means you need to have some small, egg-shaped parts of your body to be made of high quality titan :-) However, the market goes back and forth, and only those with steel nerves can get the biggest profits.

[Ichthyo]

maybe needs to say that within a 5 minutes window of close, closing can occur, and create a random time of closing everyday, but within that 5 minute window, ie 7:55 to 8:00 closing can occur.

I like the suggestion really, it introduces some useful randomness without hurting integrity of financial operations.

maybe it should be a bit larger, more like about 15 min or even 1 hour.
Just enough to make "staged operations" uninteresting and too risky. Just 5 minutes aren't enough. In the past, the manipulator typically came shortly after 19:00 and prepared the field. Then the actual activities happened during about 20 minutes.


Personally I would even randomise the trading session duration way more, since I don't see that a fixed schedule makes any sense in a 24/7 world. But I understand that your intention is to stick as closely as possible to the setup of a classical future.

[segabtc]

the 15 minutes or even an hour is fine with me, just threw 5 minutes out as a place to start the discussion. throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks, kinda thing.

[Ichthyo]

another thing not related to this drama...

since at least yesterday, I get an error from the logs view.

When navigating to the log pane, there is an popup

[object Object]: error: Internal Server Error

The upper pane with the trading fees and variation margin is filled, but the lower pane with the trading history just shows "Loading data from server"

I tried Firefox 3.5 and 16

[segabtc]

16.02 FF i see logs n trade history,need to upgrade from FF 16 to 16.02, there is a critical flaw in 16.

[Fireball]

another thing not related to this drama...

since at least yesterday, I get an error from the logs view.

When navigating to the log pane, there is an popup

[object Object]: error: Internal Server Error

The upper pane with the trading fees and variation margin is filled, but the lower pane with the trading history just shows "Loading data from server"

I tried Firefox 3.5 and 16

Please email me (with your login name) and this will be investigated and fixed.

[segabtc]

maybe give you another suggestion about market depth, keep same window for orders and put in a scrolling button up or down on the side and import all orders and let people scroll up and down through the orders to see what is there. just a suggestion.

[Paul Troon]

Proper solution is a liquid market, with many market making bots competing with each other. This way, it would not be possible to move market too much without simply losing money.

But, still, until the market becomes liquid (I'm working on that too, and will be providing reference market maker bot code for everyone to use for free), some of your suggestion makes sense: e.g. they influenced my previous two proposals.

Please do post your market marking bot ideas.  I agree that liquidity is the answer and competing (but cautious) bots should be able to provide that liquidity while netting a small profit from the spread.