Topic: Bitfinex without option of routing trades through Bitstamp = Snake Pit (Read 1290 times)

Hello,

Yes bots/traders can try to guess and trigger stop levels, however they do not access our stop orders and open positions data (this is a serious accusation that you're making). This is unfortunately true in any market and hard to circumvent.

Considering yesterday top, the top was 829 on Bitfinex, and 827.38 on Bitstamp (0.195% less). This does compute with integrated Bitstamp fees, and suggest there was not "over top" problem.

For my comment about winners and losers, every one does not have the same goal. We also have an exchange part, where people come to buy or sell bitcoins and withdraw that, and they act as a counterparty to margin traders without being qualified as losers. And there is also the counterpart of Bitstamp (which could be the "losing" counterparty of Bitfinex winners).

In any case, I wish you find an exchange that suits you, and my best regards
Raphael

Perhaps you have your operational reasons for changing the Bitstamp option, but as a trader, I quickly realised that to take advantage of the Bitfinex lower trading fees with my stop loss orders, I had to risk losing the house on them if I wanted them to have a good chance of not them not being triggered by 'Bitfinex market noise'. Since I started placing my stop orders to be triggered with the Bitstamp price, I could trade much more effectively and reliably. Without this option and having witnessed a margin call go against me in quite an astonishing manner (price being bid up whilst Stamp retreated fast, evaporating Ask walls), right at the top of yesterdays market. I no longer feel that i can trade with confidence on Bitfinex. I am a novice trader and understand very little about the ways in which bots can be deployed to manipulate price action and harvest profitable stop loss orders, but I do know when the rub of the green is going heavily against me. All i can do in these situations is decide not to play anymore.

I also don't get your comment about the more money your traders make, the more they trade on your exchange. The winners can only win as much as the losers lose. The house get's their fee's all the same whether it is from shark bot operators or from Honest John Muggins.

P.S. The fact that Ask/Bid walls can be piled up to immense heights even if the trader who created them only has margin enough to buy or sell a small fraction of the wall he has created, is something that I am very sure is heavily exploited by shark Bitfinex traders and something you may want to address.

Hello,

Yes indeed, although that is where a long running problems occurred: The price may touch 800 on Bitstamp, while no Bitstamp ask being ever posted at 800 or lower. In other words, even with our old system, you would not be executed even though you were right on this prediction (and this often happens when there is psychological levels barely touched). IN other words, you were never able to profit from market liquidity of bitstamp, always limit orders liquidity, and the way we displayed bitstamp orderbook were always confusing in that regard, leading people to think we were just a front-end of Bitstamp.

So this was part of our decision: we want to make Bitfinex a true market on its own. Bitstamp orderbook will help adding depth, which is especially useful for margin trading, however we do want traders to elaborate their strategies more on Bitfinex market. As we are growing (and we are every day that passes), the internal liquidity is more and more important and the situation where Bitfinex drives Bitstamp price happens more and more often (sometimes Bitstamp moves our price, sometimes we do move Bitstamp price). So an analysis based on Bitfinex movements does make sense.

To finish, yes I understand your point, but I can only say that this is your call weither you better trade directly on Bitstamp, or if Bitfinex added liquidity and features are worth it despite this.

Have a good day
Raphael

Raphael,

Thanks for updating this on us.  I can definitely see how the changes yield some improvements in the interface and the API side of things, and I appreciate those improvements.  However, I do have one concern: the incorporation of commission differences directly into prices now makes it harder to maximize potential gains.  Because if I think, for example, that the price is going to drop to $800 and I want to buy at $800, I used to have the option of setting a buy limit at $800 and then either paying a 0.15% or 0.35% commission depending on the exchange of execution. If I wanted to make sure I didn't pay the higher commission, I could route it through only Bitfinex. Now, however, I'd have to set my buy limit at roughly $801.6 to ensure execution if I think the price will fall to $800, because I don't know if the $800 price will occur on Bitstamp or Bitfinex. While this is fine if the nominal $800 price is reached on Bitstamp and not on Bitfinex, it decreases my potential gains if the nominal $800 price is reached on Bitfinex, because I was not able to set the buy limit at $800 due to the uncertainty of the exchange on which it would occur.

Again, I appreciate the improvements that the changes have brought, but would there be any way to make it possible to place limit orders at prices that are actually present on Bitstamp's order book, not only at prices that are adjusted for potential commission differences?  This would really help the problem I described.  Thanks!

Hello,

I think there is a misunderstanding here, and I would have appreciate if you have send us an email to ask for explanation rather than accusing our company of theft and lies.

As I'm a nice guy I will explain you what has changed:
First, before the change, routing to BSTP was less interesting than not routing your orders. By not routing your order, you would have the same than by routing to BSTP PLUS eventually additional Bitfinex orders.
Furthermore, because of the way Bitstamp API is designed, there was no way for us to actually place your order on Bitstamp. It was executed on Bitfinex and the system was trying to match this execution with a market order on Bitstamp. This could (and was) exploited by traders sometimes, as we could not control the execution price.
This had also other problems, linked to the fact the we were pulling Bitstamp orderbook each trading cycle, which was slow, prone to errors, and resulted in overall slow (and sometimes stalled) trading engine, with crossed orderbook. And other small issues.

What has changed now:
Bitstamp orders are still there: they are integrated as BFX orders into our own orderbook, by grouping them in small increment, with slippage+ our own fees accounted, to give you a "integrated fee" of 0.15 to 0.25% of the price + BFX fees of 0.1 to 0.15%,  compared to the old fixed 0.35% fee. In other words, with the discount you can have on BFX fees, you can on average pay less fees than before.
But the result in term of liquidity is THE SAME than before with a non-routed order, and better than a routed order.
Furthermore, there are not distinguishable from any BFX orders because there is no reason for that: you have a ask or a bid, it is executed or not depending on your order and that's it. The only reason we integrate Bitstamp orderbook as tightly as possible is because our business is based on trading volume, and the more volume we have the better.
This has several benefits:
-Several times faster trading engine
-No more crossed orderbook (more attractive for market makers)
-Better management of our liquidity on Bitstamp


I hope this clears things out. If you still have any questions please don't hesitate to ask, but keep in mind that although I love to explains things to people who insult us during my few breaks I have between days and nights of working my ass off to make a better exchange, my patience has some limits

Oh, and one last thing: we do not have bots accessing stop orders price and margin call liquidation price to place orders. The more profits traders make, the more they trade, the more we make profit. Not the other way around.

Thank you
Raphael
Bitfinex team

Since yesterday, it doesn't.


When I first went over to Bitfinex and started shorting. I soon realised that if I set my stop loss anywhere near where the market action was going, it was a near inevitability that it would get called. For this reason, I started routing margin calls through Bitstamp which resulted in me being able to proceed and make reliable trades, placing safe margin calls, both in terms of minimising loss and also in terms of being sheltered from the spot price.

Bitfinex have recently taken this option away however, leaving only the Bitfinex order book available for placing margin calls. The big problem with this is that the Bid/Ask walls on Bitfinex are a big fraud full of liar Bids and liar Asks, unlike the 'liar' offers on other exchanges' order books, the majority of Bitfinex liar orders cannot be triggered because their will not be adequate margin in the account creating them and registering them on the order book. For example, i can have enough funding and leverage in my account to to order 10 BTC, but I can repeat this order until infinity, and it will show up as legit offer in order book. I would further suggest, that there are bots which are programmed to manipulate these liar walls, that also have access to a list of trader's margin calls. The bots can then calculate which margin calls are 'profitable' to harvest and which aren't. Today, I got a margin call on what should have been a blinding short. My stop loss was behind 350 worth of Ask bids, the majority of those bids vanished and a 63 BTC order then triggered my short stop loss, right at the near tip of the price spike, despite Bitstamp going in opposite direction. This is bullshit. This is theft. I can't prove it, but I would bet that the operators of the exchange are involved in these sorts of farming operations.

Keep away from the place or give it a try and find out the hard way.

So what? It has this option...

More info please.

Can you explain exactly what you experienced?

I'm thinking of putting money there soon and would like to hear about user experiences.

Either your order is filled or it isn't.  What are you complaining about?  If you make an offer, someone can either take it or leave it.  That's what an exchange is for.   

Bitfinex without option of routing trades through Bitstamp...... is basically a den of fucking theives.

Sit back in watch in amusement as all your limit and stop orders are farmed like wheat.

Fucking horrible dodgy bastard exchange.