@bitcoinwisdom
Could you please look one more time into bid/ask for Bitstamp?
I just found another site that shows historical data of bid/ask for bitstamp (
http://coinsight.org/bitstamp), so there must be some way to do it.
I know you said already that the Bitstamp API doesn't give you the info directly, but somehow those other guys seemed to manage to extract the information somehow... and you've proven to be extremely competent, so I just hope you can get it to work as well.
It isn't trade bid/ask ratio, it's orderbook(depth) bid/ask ratio. Maybe I confused before, do you mean orderbook bid/ask ratio or trade bid/ask?
order book!
damn, we talked about different things all the time, huh?
I see. I'm not familiar with this indicator. If ask is 1 2 and bid 0.1 0.2, Is the sum bid / sum ask (0.1*0.2)/(2)=0.01 ?
To my knowledge, order book bid/ask ratio is calculated as: Total_Bid_Sum(USD)/Total_Ask_Sum(BTC).
For example, right now Bitstamp total order book BID is ~22 million USD, ASK is ~17000 BTC, so bid/ask is ~1294 USD/BTC.
There are then two ways to display this ratio over time:
(1) "raw", as calculated above, or
(2) "normalized" for the actual price at the same time as the ratio is calculated, example: currently, ratio is 1294 USD/BTC (as calculated above), current price is 585 USD/BTC, so normalized ratio is ~2.2 (dimensionless).
* * *
In my experience order book bid/ask ratio has to be used carefully, since the order book is obviously target for manipulation, but looking at how the ratio changes over time can be very useful to determine trend reversals.
Here are some problems to support this indicator.
The key problem is 'not all exchanges returns full orderbook'. So it only works in some exchangee. If limit the orderbook range, for example from -20% to 20%. I have no idea if the indicator is still valuable.
To implement this indicator will change a lot of the database structure and write much code for the server does not record the orderbook. So I have to ensure the indicator is really useful and worth to be implemented.
I'm not sure I understand the problem. There are two things you mention, right?
1) Problem: Not all exchanges return the entire order book. Solution: Work with what you get. Also, it seems that the currently most important exchange, Bitstamp, does return the full order book, right?
2) Problem: Too much data needed. Solution: Maybe I missed something, but you don't need to keep the order book data, no? Just calculate the ratio once, and keep that. Or did I misunderstand you?
I don't know what happens at the backend of your website, so maybe I underestimate the amount of code needed to make bid/ask work, but to me it seems that if you only store the bid/ask ratio value itself, not the order book data, it's not such a huge amount of data you need to handle... but maybe I'm wrong.