As a side note they also only let you have 100 open positions at any one time (according to their API page), which means you could only really have 100 santoshis difference between the lowest and highest prices, and if you're creating buy as well as sell orders, it's only really 50 santoshis either way. Seeing as you've put in lots of orders already, does this mean you have hundreds/thousands of open orders on vircurex? Also, is it more important for you to set the price in 1 santoshi increments, or set the range (eg 50-350 santoshis) with it working out the increments itself?
I have many hundreds of open orders.
I have many on the same price, even, because I have started back at one satoshi all over again many times by now.
I post my offers manually though, not via the API. Maybe the API has limitations the website/webpage version doesn't.
Heck I just started back at one satoshi again today and am still in the process of filling each satoshi of price yet again on the buy side.
Yes it is important to fill every satoshi of price, because otherwise people try to break, to sit on a price you didn't sit on yet.
If there are no prices sitting empty except where the buys meet the sells - in the "spread" region - they tend to go there, which means you can kind of hint them along.
There is a bot it seems for example on the I0Coin and IXCoin markets on Vircurex that very annoyingly tends to refuse to let even a tiny little offer get in front of it in the sense of being closer to the spread region that it is.
It keeps three batches of coins on hand to sell, and if you place an offer at a lower sell price than it's lowest sell price it cancels the highest price of its three orders and put it one satoshi lower in price than your offer.
Even if it is dealing with a few thousand at a time and you place an offer to sell only ten, it seemingly cannot stand the idea that you might get to sell your ten whatevers before it has managed to sell its few thousand. But if you place offers at every satoshi way down toward the spread-region, you can sometimes manage to get your offer to stick, maybe because it does not want to sell for less than it bought for or something.
Rather than play cancel-and-re-offer with it, just putting offers on every satoshi lets me get tons of offers in on the whole range it tries to play leapfrog with, so ultimately my average sell price is higher than the sell price it ends up leapfrogging its way down to.
On the buy side, the purpose is to uphold the price/value of the coin, so having an offer on every satoshi means every satoshi of price is going to cost who-ever tries to drive the price down. There are no freebies, each and every satoshi they want to drive the price down is going to cost them.
I have lately been placing offers to buy one or ten million divided by the satoshis of price, so that each satoshi they try to drive it down will cost them more (of what they are selling) than the previous satoshi of price did.
If you look at many order books, often it seems the opposite: everyone is crowding their buy offers up near the highest price, as soon as that thin crust is broken, the so called resistance maybe could be what it is I do not know the terminology really, but once the people clamouring to buy at high prices are sold to often from there on down is a crash waiting to happen, hardly anyone apparently wants to buy for low prices. No wonder we see crashes so often in cryptocoin, everyone apparently wants to buy high and failing that not buy at all!
Similarly on the sell side: everyone wants to sell cheap, but once you buy that thin crust of cheap sell offers, it is thin air going way the heck up, so prices seem to skyrocket because so few people, so far between, want to sell for high prices!
-MarkM-