Topic: How many of you have been Zhoutonged? - page 6. (Read 26392 times)

Done. Now Bitcoinica officially provides daily quotes charts.

Also, the new pricing algorithm is already running in production after testing against all historical data.

Available at: http://charts.bitcoinica.com/

Off-topic: The most exciting day since Bitcoinica's launch.

You can also look for outside news. For example there was a segment about bitcoin on Fox that came out on a Sunday and a few days later the mysterious MtGox countdown was due to finish. That WAS a very good time to long.

I don't recall my rationale for this ingenious idea.

I think it was just to keep track of my various positions experiments, or in protest for my trailing stops not working, or ... I'm now setting my position on Mt. Gox and then moving coins and codes over to Bitcoinica for more leverage and stops. So far that's not working brilliantly either. Fortunately, I happen to always know the trend and future direction*, I just can't always get the maximas.

* except when I don't.

I like your idea about having multiple accounts. You keep a certain amount of reserve USD or BTC on Mtgox and if one of your accounts looks like its about to be liquidated you deposit some capital to take it back. The rational being that if the market moves against you it will eventually come back and you can exit without loss. Of course if the market REALLY moves like over a $1 change then you might lose your backup capital as well. You can also try to short the spike then there's another spike and your forever throwing in more capital to try to stop the forced liquidation. If you can get your money in fast enough is might be 3-4 days until you can exit your position without a loss.

Then your feeling sorry for yourself thinking about how rich you would be if you went long.

This all comes back to knowing what the trend is. At the moment we're still not quite sure if BTC is going back to above 5 or its crashing back to parity.

If you're going against the trend take out small profits. If your going with it wait for the large ones. Of course I got nuts just trying to work out what the trend actually is.

Same goes for if your making a small loss and your not sure if you should exit your position or not. The simple rule of thumb is are you bettering for or against the trend?

I've wondered why/how anyone gets liquidated at all. People set a highly leveraged unprotected position and go on vacation (called sleep in the bitcoin world)?

Yes I know what a vector is.

This information is inherently a series of points, whether it is plotted on a bitmap or as an svg, it is absolutely not an infinitely smooth line.

If you would like to find out why I didn't simply do this as a series of points simply try and load http://beast.intersango.com/dots.svg

I actually went back to CFD trading bank stocks and have been making a little money and keeping much better hours and not a forced liquidated yet!

 The thing I noticed about my CFD provider is that the amount of margin you are given is determined on where your stop loss is. Why not make something similar on bitcoinica? For example if you have no stop loss you can only trade 1:1 the closer your stop loss is the more margin you can use. That way there really shouldn't be any forced liquidations.

Though saved as SVG, Ttis is still a bitmap image. A true SVG image is vector (Scalable Vector Graphics), and zooming into the image allows the viewer to see details. Here's what an SVG graph should look like, where you can zoom in and still see details:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Graph_of_example_function.svg

Zooming into your image shows zoomed-in mush:


SVG is essentially like a graphics vector language: "draw line from 0,0 to 100,100", which works very well independent of screen resolution, rather than a bitmap that records the values of individual pixels, and will show pixelation when zoomed.

The Mt. Gox price is for reference, for comparison purposes.  Seeing the bands without the actual price doesn't fully inform the reader of the underlying market conditions.


Yes, I am referring to trading actual coins on Mt. Gox, a reference I clearly buried later in that paragraph.

Zhou'tong' song? 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oai1V7kaFBk&feature=youtu.be&t=1m31s

commendable.

If only for casual browsing, the Mt. Gox price rarely goes outside of the bitcoinica spread. Bitcoinica spread just expands like bollinger bands.




It's not just the guys on the wrong side of the trade who get screwed. Those who bet correctly get screwed out of winnings as well. During volatile spikes, the ask sky rockets, while the bid moves not a satoshi. If the price does not stabilize at the higher price, the spike occurs for the losers but not for the winners. The only winner is Bitcoinica.




Surely you are referring to Mt. Gox and not Bitcoinica?

In response to phantomcircuit, and various other participants:

I'm aware of this issue and that's why I have reversed some of the forced liquidations that are deemed inaccurate. In the following days, I will do these two things:

1. Improve the pricing algorithm to prevent the unnecessary spikes.

2. Make charts for history quotes available, for every day since we launched. The chart will look similar to phantomcircuit's, showing both buying prices and selling prices.

I apologize for not doing enough to protect our customers' interest in terms of system engineering.

I have fixed the timezone issue.

http://beast.intersango.com/bitcoinica.svg

You can clearly see the spikes on bitcoinica are significantly larger than the spikes seen on mtgox and are well outside the normal spread.

The MtGox prices are shifted (i think i have a tiemzone issue).
http://beast.intersango.com/bitcoinica.svg

I'd recommend that you add in the actual Mt. Gox price to your graph, and then generate this file as an SVG so that people can zoom into the image without loss of resolution, and see how wide the spread becomes.  At least one person posted saying they'd been liquidated at $4.93, even though the price never went $0.40 near that.  The algorithm makes sense for bitcoinica, but not for users.

I find it's far easier to make money on the price spikes or dips when idiots (er, non-price sensitive individuals) buy or sell 10-20k+ coins at once, rather than slowly buying or selling over time.  Catching big coin dumps with pre-placed orders is more profitable then attempting to short the market, as the market clearly jumps right back up within minutes of a sell-off.  Also, catching these spikes reduces the magnitude of the spike, helping bitcoin stability and increasing liquidity, whereas a liquidated short will spike the market again (short squeeze), which isn't good for bitcoin.  So not only is it safer and more reliable money to actually buy & sell bitcoins on mtgox, rather than betting on the price through the (mostly) bucket shop that is bitcoinica, it's also better for bitcoin (the hedged percent on bitcoinica's front page is the percent that they are a bucket shop that day).

Wow...that's sort of crazy leverage. I thought they scaled it back.

I get what you are saying now. I have never tried to look at their charts, but I assumed it would be somewhat transparent.

They actually increased leverage to 10:1.

The real issue here is that their previous quote history is not public.

The reason my data isn't complete is that there is no way to get the full quote history.

Someone simply checking the charts provided would not see the spikes as these show averages.

They did drop the leveraging from 5:1 to 2:1, IIRC. There is always uncertainty in predicting the future, and businesses exist to make themselves money, not to make you money.

I would settle for a graph such as this one being presented to bitcoinica users.