Topic: IS LONGS/SHORTS RULING THE MARKET PRICE? (Read 194 times)

Think about it this way and decide for yourself, there is this market where people with millions of dollars are putting all of their money on and it leverages it with maybe x100 or maybe less but they are making more than these people with millions of dollars who have leveraged their position up or down has the means to sell or buy more in order to increase the price or decrease the price to make even more money and their x100 leverages to happen if they want to.

Do you think that would shape the market? A person with means to make x100 more money with their money would do it? The answer seems obvious and that is why I personally feel like we are going to be at the hands of these leverage margin traders for a long time, hopefully it would somehow stop in the future but not for a while.

The Long/Short ratios on Bitmex actually aren't a real ratio. Its just a calculation of all the posted positions when someone inputs a command in the trollbox. Its a useless indicator because when the market is bullish, there are usually only bullish people posting their gains and same for vice versa. Usually people don't post a loss since it makes them look bad.

Also Bitmex is a futures exchange so there is 1 buyer and 1 seller and the contracts are fully balanced. So if there are $1 billion open interest right now then $1 billion amount of longs and $1 billion amount is shorts. It will always be balanced.

The whales also do study the chart to know were the gravity is! In the market, we do have many whales and most of them tried to outsmart each other and if a whale mistake using leverage trading without looking at the chart to see what is happening he might have his entire capital wipe out by the bigger whales.

long and shorts on platforms offering leverage trading is one of the factors but like everything else it has never been reliable because the market still is deciding the price not even the whales. there has been a lot of cases where a large number of shorts were indicating a certain move and it was correct but also there has been a lot of other times where the market moved in the exact opposite direction.

this is exactly why from time to time we see a whale be crushed by the market. what you said about a whale with 1000BTC is correct but you are missing the entire rest of the market which has hundreds of thousands of bitcoin!

Both longs/shorts rule the market and they have their own different time of impact on the market. Like the whales you talk about, I think they are the ones that engage in short a lot which is why we do often see the price of bitcoin crashes from time to time, but still yet, they cannot all rule the market at the same time because they also have tons of transaction that clashes a lot.

Bitmex is not the only exchange where the whales operates, they operate in other exchanges too and because they come from different regions performing transactions at different time, you see prices go down now and within minutes, it has gone up again, and the main reason is that those large buyers enters the market at different time, and one can decide to enter the market while the other decided to exit the market.

Yea I have to agree against the whale argument, the most genuine holder of that opinion is the big bears on BTC who believe the whole deal is fake and a ponzi scheme.   It should be quite obvious by now its not fake or ponzi even if you still want to argue its no value, those two thing are not the case.
   BTC is the most widely distributed of the crypto from what I remember, which makes sense as its so often been sold off and passed around to many people of many nations and then forgot about and then revived and so on.  
The only reasonable whale argument is corruption, fake accounting and fractional reserves.   Thats in the history of BTC with Mt.Gox which did not have enough BTC to be solvent.   The other take would be the use of satoshi accounts with BTC in them never moved, thats a very large central mass which would be a whale for sure.


Its a herd of people in the market, its not that hard to make people move as a herd but very often they are just reacting as one people based on sentiment.    So if a million people share the same view on news, being negative and are willing to sell then we have a wave effect.  I wouldn't call that a whale as its a million big and small people with holdings not just 3 as some imagine.
  Its human nature to envision the market as being like a big robot we can fight or an animal, its more fractured then that.   Also trends are spread over multiple time frames I think, like waves on a beach they can add up or knock each other down.

The Federal reserve is a whale type operator, that whole market is centralised and BTC is not this but thats an example we are part of everyday.

We can not assume the change in price will always be because of whales manipulation there are times that they try to manipulate it but failed to do so, And there are times that the market is pretty normal in my opinion the market analysis and chart can be certain sometimes so we can not ignore them, as I believe in the saying that history can repeat itself, That is why many speculators would say such things, So in my opinion whales would simply can not rule the market with just manipulation or they can not rule the market at all, No one can.

It would only work like that if the market = one whale vs. all the plebs. You're not accounting for all the other whales who are perpetually waiting in the wings.

Don't get me wrong; whales try to move the market all the time. They just fail all the time too. Many a whale have been harpooned in this market. Have you seen the size of some liquidations on Bitmex? We've seen Bitmex whales literally commit suicide because their losses have been so large.

Take the last move down to the $9,000s. Large sellers were incessantly trying to break through to the $8,000s despite the weak bear momentum. They were likely heavily short on Bitmex. What happened? They ran into other whales with different plans who were incessantly market buying into every dump. Those buyers quickly absorbed all available supply in the low $9,000s and trapped the sellers who were trying to push price down.

That wasn't manipulation; It was literally just supply meeting demand. Smart whales move with the market. The ones trying to push the market in the wrong direction never stay whales for long.

I think that only applies in times when it's bubbling. The rest of the time there are enough low volume moments for a single entity to blow things up. String a bunch of moves like that together and you've made a nice pile of money.

Bitmex still rules, just as Bitfinex did back in the day. On top of that there are now CME futures which have grown massively in significance since launch.

That makes for multiple angles where the spot market is basically there to be kicked around to profit on derivatives and I'm sure that's the prime motive in many of the moves we see these days. All markets have leaders that set the tone. Most are just followers.

Do you think 1000 Bitcoin will affect the market and lead to drastic changes? I do not think so. It's like a piece of ice in a big ocean.
A group of whiles can influence the price if they have a lot of conditions like spreading fake news, getting a lot of coins/pools, creating more FUD, and providing a safe haven to get the currency back in place.
Overall the effect will be short, fast and limited other than ShitAltcoins as one manipulator may lead to a lot of changes for some times but who will care. "Small fish will do."

Right, as we have seen in 2017, there are a lot of players who have change the rule of the game. Previously, only few whales and the market are too small that's why they can still 'manipulate' the market at will.

But in 2017, we have seen a lot of changes, more big player comes into the future, single entities, corporations, institutional investors. There was one suggestion that whales are colluding within the market to put down the price, but I seriously doubt that it had happen or will happen. Whales have their own rule and they are also competing against themselves.

"Whales" are not a singular entity. There are lots and lots of whales competing against one another across many different exchanges. In the above scenario, another whale (or many other smaller buyers) could instantly buy the price back up, causing the dump to end as a wick rather than a sustained selloff.

It's much harder to manipulate the BTC market than people think.

Shorts cannot control the market, holders you can debate about them but shorters dont actually own anything in order to control it.   A short player must be very clever to win their game as they pay for the privilege twice, on spread and cost to borrow.

Put it this way, every short seller is a future buyer.   When people suggest that short sellers are the bane of a market, they forget the biggest buyers at the bottom of a dip are the short seller who must return the coins he never really owned back to his master.    The one certain buyer in a market is the guy who has a ticking clock over his head, he might sell today but he is a buyer tomorrow.   Its why they allow them in main markets and are not really any negative here, naked short selling where the assets never exist is something else but I dont think that is a thing in BTC

I'm pretty sure that most competent traders have been paying attention to leverage platforms for years now. Bitfinex's ~$160 low in 2015 was the result of a massive long squeeze. Other exchanges followed but not as deep.

Back in China's glory days their top exchanges were generating millions of Bitcoins in leveraged volume every single day. Traders are used to how important these platforms are.

Leverage in general (at least within the crypto space) has become the next big thing where even the most common joes know how to open a leveraged position on platforms such as BitMEX. People are more adapted than you think.

We have seen people talk about charts and the indicators and all that and they are trying to figure out what actually makes bitcoin go up and down but whenever you take a look at the charts you will realize that a chart could be right or wrong at most 2-3 times in a row and eventually fails.

However, if you check bitmex and all other places like that which gives leverage to whales to actually change the price, it is clear that they are actually inside the market knowing where it will go because they are the ones making it happen.

A whale with a bunch of bitcoin (lets say over 1000 btc) can literally buy 100 bitcoin worth shorts and sell all his 900 bitcoins to drop the price of bitcoin and make a ton of money and get more than 1000 after the process is done. Maybe we should not look at the charts but start looking at the changes in leverage purchases? That seems like a bigger impact on the price.