My analysis of recent Clam market situation, does it sound about right, anyone have additional or alternate info:
A huge amount of Clam coins were forced on the market by margin calls at Poloniex, in a tiny amount of time, which sold thru all the buy orders. Something like 300,000+ Clams sold in hours, that's a staggering 10% of the entire circulation, over $3M in hours versus avg daily volume $20k-200k. I think far beyond what any whale controls.
Was not news or fact-driven event, not even a real market event by actual human trading, it was artificial, basically an accident, a glitch.
Because of the margin pool, after the initial trigger sale, it went into an automatic feedback loop: price drop triggers margin calls to sell, which drops the quote price more, which triggers more margin calls, etc. Many of the investors didn't even intend to sell, it was automatic. And some or even most of them had profits, and are obviously Clam traders, holders and enthusiasts, so they might well be buying back in now, except their accounts are frozen while Poloniex sorts it all out. The margin calls likely extended to other coins in the overall pool, which probably had related effects, resulting in the overall 1800 btc margin lossage figure (i.e. that figure seems way more than can be just from Clams)
So it will take a while to sort out. Right now the trading is very light, people who need to sell or aftershocks, everyone obviously very nervous and wondering wth happened.
It seems this unfortunate "glitch", was triggered by either a naive whale (who would have profited a lot more by sensibly managing their position), or more likely imo, professional manipulators, who intentionally played the margin exposure and algorithms. It's a heckuva glitch, but I think Clams will recover; whether in days or months, who knows.
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The reality is, there was no negative news or event, Clam coin functions extremely well, fast and reliable, with ongoing development and many features builtin and service sites offering free anonymous wallets, escrow, games, etc, and is an excellent basic money coin. Plus the Eco-sensible stake mining, that invites and rewards anyone to support the network, participate in mining without a huge power/computing cost.
Seems to me we just saw several months of steady organic growth, reflecting growing awareness and exciting developments like at FreeBitcoins for example, the Swap feature effectively adding more Anon/Privacy options, and easy convenient access for people who don't want to bother with exchange trading. (really great contribution BAC, Xploited) I can see that enthusiasm coming back quickly, once the hysteria dissipates.
The good news is, if the trigger was a whale, that's one less killer whale now, and if manipulators, at least Poloniex has turned off the margin, so it will be much harder to repeat.
r.i.p. polo haha ===>
