Topic: Bitcoinica - Advanced Bitcoin Trading Platform - page 16. (Read 51103 times)

As far as I know, the stop triggers when the bitcoinica price crosses it. So when MtGox is at $3 you want to buy bitcoins, which means you use the buy value of bitcoinica. Assuming a $0.1 spread, you should set your stop to $3.05.

If someone could verify this, it would be nice, but I believe this is how it works.

Suppose I am short and would like to set a stop to be triggered iff the Mt. Gox price rises above $3. If I expect a $0.1 spread on Bitcoinica, where should I set my stop? $2.95, $3.00, $3.05, or.... ?

I suspect it is sorting alphabetically somewhere, and "2.80" is represented at "2.8". That would generate described behaviour.

Hi again Zhou, I managed to find three things to complain about.

Sorting by price exhibits odd behavior. For example (descending): 2.90, 2.94, 2.92, 2.80, 2.88, 2.86, 2.84, 2.82, 2.70, 2.78, 2.76, ...

Refresh kills sort/filter: If I choose to sort by amount or by price ascending, within seconds (AJAX refresh) my preference is ignored and the orders will be sorted by price descending.

Limit order history updates: I very much appreciate seeing the active orders listed by price. Excellent default behavior! However, when viewing order history, unexecuted limit orders should not be updated. If I have set a limit order to buy at $1, I should not continually see "updated less than a minute ago". From a historical perspective it is only interesting to know when I set the order and when it is canceled or executed. As for trailing stops I might want to know more than you show (when I set, at what price, last updated, current execution price).

But these are minor complaints. I keep missing max/minimas because I rely on Mt. Gox charts despite your larger spreads. But otherwise, the site is great and helps me sleep at night. Thank you.

Thanks, I'll look into it.

BTW, Zhou. The new Bitcoinica is amazing. A few of the buttons confused me for no more than a minute, but wow. Excellent. The only thing I have left to complain about is having nothing left to complain about. Damn! I think you've implemented every single one of our suggestions ^2. Make'n money's never been so easy. Tusind tak skal du have!

Change your DNS settings to use http://www.opendns.com/.

Zhou, your site appears to be down.

EDIT: Well others have confirmed 'works for me'... I can not even ping bitcoinica.com from any of my local machines. Anyone have a tip? (I'm clearly on the net)

EDIT2: https://50.56.4.62/ (works for me)

What's quick pick? Is that just quick UI input or does it execute?

Looks like the new bitcoinica UI is up!

I don't know what's going on with the rest of your situation, but this at least I can confirm. The position info doesn't update automatically, you have to manually refresh.

OK, now I have no idea what's going on and think maybe there is a bug or something (though the strongest hypothesis to me is remains that I am misunderstanding the system.)

I logged on from work, and hurray, I'm no up by $0.16.  The lower end of the spread was above the 'base price' of my single outstanding 'position' (the one I cannot get rid of.)  At least I am pretty sure they were, but not %100.

The window was open for a few hours and the spread display dutifully changed up and down, but my position is mysteriously static.  Wondering if perhaps only the spread display was AJAX, I hit the refresh.  It seems to be the case that the display on the page is generally not dynamic.  Although both elements of the spread are still above my 'base price', I am now _down_ by $1.04 and I didn't touch a damn thing.

Another thing that I thought was funny was that the lower value of the spread sat at my 'base price' exactly to 4 decimal places for some time.  I would not expect this unless the spread was particular to me, or unless my piddly little bet was a noticeable fraction of Bitcoinica's books.

What's your point?  Funny looking black people look funny?

OK.  If anyone is interested, here is the result of my hammering on various buttons as outlined in my message.  I guess there is not UI way to get a history so I use the API.

curl....oinica.com/api/orders.json?n=10" --basic | sed -e 's/{/\n/g
...
"amount":-25.0,"created_at":"2011-11-22T10:08:45-07:00","id":70352,"pair":"BTCUSD","price":null,"status":"INSUFFICIENT MARGIN","type":"MARKET","updated_at":"2011-11-22T10:08:52-07:00","user_id":1380},
"amount":-25.0,"created_at":"2011-11-22T10:08:05-07:00","id":70351,"pair":"BTCUSD","price":null,"status":"EXECUTED @ 2.3142","type":"MARKET","updated_at":"2011-11-22T10:08:16-07:00","user_id":1380},
"amount":-25.0,"created_at":"2011-11-22T10:07:44-07:00","id":70350,"pair":"BTCUSD","price":null,"status":"EXECUTED @ 2.3142","type":"MARKET","updated_at":"2011-11-22T10:07:51-07:00","user_id":1380},
"amount":25.0,"created_at":"2011-11-22T10:07:02-07:00","id":70349,"pair":"BTCUSD","price":null,"status":"EXECUTED @ 2.3537","type":"MARKET","updated_at":"2011-11-22T10:07:07-07:00","user_id":1380},
"amount":25.0,"created_at":"2011-11-22T10:06:38-07:00","id":70348,"pair":"BTCUSD","price":null,"status":"EXECUTED @ 2.3537","type":"MARKET","updated_at":"2011-11-22T10:06:53-07:00","user_id":1380},
"amount":-25.0,"created_at":"2011-11-21T00:42:07-07:00","id":69432,"pair":"BTCUSD","price":2.2952,"status":"EXECUTED @ 2.3144","type":"LIMIT","updated_at":"2011-11-21T19:31:17-07:00","user_id":1380}

Looking at the outputs and timings, I wonder if I didn't 'execute' correctly.  Seems like when I put the order in, at least one annoying box popped up. which I had to 'ok' or something.  It was unclear what that was, but in a typical UI, one only needs to be annoyed at most once by such a thing before an action is taken.

This sounds like an actual problem, and not a misunderstanding of a feature. You should post your order placement history for Z to look at and make sure it's not a bug.

@tvbcof  You are not the only one who has these problems.

The saga continues.  For others who might want to play around with Bitcoinica, here's some details.

After deciding that I didn't need Bitcoinica at this time, I withdrew most of my BTC, but left a token amount in with the intent of losing it playing around with leverage.  That has not happened yet, but it seems that I am on my way with nothing I can do about it.

I had 8 BTC.  I decided to try to bet that the price would go up to 2.29 (from current 2.19 or something).  I put in a 'limit sell' at 2.29 for 25 BTC which I thought would execute if the price hit 2.29.  What I thought was happening is that I was borrowing Bitcoinica funds (25 - 8 BTC) and that if the price fell a small amount, I would lose ?? but if I bet right ant the price went up, I would win ??.  The experiment was to see what the ?? would be.

What happened was that somehow the 'order' was there, but I had no 'position'.  I was not sure if this was normal or what.  I waited for the lower number of the spread to exceed my target (the bet happened to be going in my favor) but when it did, nothing happened.

Oh well.  I canceled the order.  To what would have been my horror had I not been trying to lose my money, canceling an order turns it into a 'position' it seems.  Now I have a 'position' on the books with an immediate 1% loss.  Every time I try to 'liquidate' the position, I lose another chunk of money and need to settle, but it says I have 'insufficient funds' to actually liquidate.

I guess what I will do now is just sit on things until my goal is met (that is, until I've lost all my money.)  Any attempt to do otherwise seems to simply expedite that process.

It's not a bad idea to hold long on bitcoins through the basic exchange, and then place a short order hedge on bitcoinica. The advantage is being able to adjust your hedge easily with room on the margin, and maintain gains during a price fall, still holding your BTC while you wait for an upswing.

And about the address, the sig is completely sarcastic; I don't want or need your money. I find the posting of addresses to be very much like pan-handling.

Your verbal thanks are enough for me.

That was basically what I concluded, and I appreciate a confirmation from someone who clearly understands this stuff much better.

If/when I develop any strategies which would benefit by having a need to short, I'll re-visit things.  OTOH, I have a fairly large collection of BTC by this time, so here again it may make more sense to self-fund.  Not sure yet, and probably I will never need to be

Yes, if you don't trade on a margin, /and/ have a bot to build your own stop/limit orders, /and/ never want to short bitcoins when you only have USD, or long bitcoins when you only have bitcoins, then there is no real benefit to bitcoinica.

I'm not quite sure which negative balances you were seeing. I funded my account with some USD and later some BTC as well, so I may not have seen it.