Topic: Breaking $5 today (Mon 5/3/2012) (Read 1921 times)

Swap is something to do with interest...I don't understand it fully...but it has links on the top of the page that shows you what the rates are.

Original order

Pair            Type           Amount   Price           Updated           Status
BTCUSD    Market   1.0           $4.8600   28 Feb 16:21   Executed @ 4.9085

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5 seconds spacing between each...

Pair   Amount   Base Price   Liq. price   P/L ($)   P/L (%)   Swap ($)   Actions
BTCUSD   1.0   $4.9085   $3.1068   $0.06   1.296%   -$0.01   Liquidate

Pair   Amount   Base Price   Liq. price   P/L ($)   P/L (%)   Swap ($)   Actions
BTCUSD   1.0   $4.9085   $3.1068   $0.01   0.212%   -$0.01   Liquidate

Pair   Amount   Base Price   Liq. price   P/L ($)   P/L (%)   Swap ($)   Actions
BTCUSD   1.0   $4.9085   $3.1068   $0.06   1.296%   -$0.01   Liquidate

Decided I was going to leave well alone until I understood what was going on... but now I don't understand why I have a negative swap...

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Are you still long? I've reduced my position somewhat...the technicals are messing with my mind.

actually it was 5.02 and it sold -- woohoo

and I woke up to being in the green with a 2& profit, and it's been bouncing around the red and green +1/-1 all day for me...
it's daring me to pull the trigger and get out.

Well something happened...


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yay someone did it!

Hah maybe...its monday morning here in Australia!

because I don't drink and trade 

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why put off what you can today to tomorrow?

because its SUNDAY!

we'll get to it first thing Monday

Yeah opening a new account just to short is a bad idea -  as your short makes money your long simultaneously loses roughly the same amount. Better off reducing your commitment. Selling half a stock you hold and buying it at a lower price has the same effect as having no stock and short selling the same amount and buying it back later...just different terms for slightly different things. It's all about making a prediction on the price and getting it right.

A short can be thought of as "selling stock", only you don't have the stock to sell. It's still related to selling, though, so if you have 100 btc and sell it for $5, buying back at $4, it's the same as borrowing 100 btc and selling it at $5, and buying it back at $4. That means in bitcoinica, which has a pseudo short sell, selling in that combines the two.

With that in mind, if you want to sell the stock you have at a certain price, put a limit (eg $5.50 limit for 200 sold). If you then want to then make a short sell at that same price, do another limit for how many short at the same price (eg another $5.50 for 200 sold). If you had 200 btc to begin with, if the price hits $5.50 you'll effectively sell those and short sell an extra 200 btc.

Market just means do it right now...only use this when you really want to just get out or get in as quickly as possible. Liquidate is just a market order with how many btc you have/don't have, and is no faster than a market order.

Stop means "activate this as a market order once this limit is hit" - guarantees a buy/sell once a trigger has been hit whereas a limit does not...useful if you don't want to watch it all the time.

Trailing stop...haven't used them before so I don't know that one. I think it's supposed to always change and set itself to some percentage less than what target you put in, so if it loses profitability it automatically closes the position.

Does that help?

Still got it, but the problem is I know what I want to do, but not how to do it.

So theoretically I want to add a short to preferably at a new position;  so

Do I sell market/limit/stop/trailing stop

or do I buy market/limit/stop/trailing stop

I was absolutely guaranteed to get it wrong. There should be a simple guide somewhere that says

1) if you think it is going to go up do, x, y, and z.

2) if you think it is going to go down do, a, b, and c. 

1a) crap it's going down; to make the best of it liquidate or do r, s, t if you think it is going down nnn.mmm or oo.ppp%

2a) crap it's going up; to make the best of it liquidate or do d, e, f if you think it is going down iii.jjjj or kkk.lll%


Or the better option; open a new account and short from scratch.... which seems to defeat the purpose really.


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Don't feel too bad if you still have your position...it's possible we just experienced a bear trap. I know some people think the bottom has already been hit and it's rebounding now...from the poll so far...there are just as many who don't .

The only thing you could have done if you suspected it was going back up was increase leverage and your position, or increase margin balance and increase your position...that way you would have profited up to this price, and would have had a cheaper buy price. But of course, it would still have to break $5 to be much use anyway.

nope, because I have a bid open at 5.00001 from just before the hack, and if it does that, then the tract of questions that I've just written on how to use bitcoinica to recover from a market buy at 4.9085, to a loss of 15% (now at -1.958%) would be entirely valueless. That is at the time of writing it was down around 4.6/4.65 and I wanted to know what if anything I could do to better my position on coming back up.

So given the odds that I'll have to win both ways if it gets above 5.0, and given Murphy, that is just blatant jinxing...


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There's momentum to carry on the upswing...will it last?