Topic: Look at all those Buy orders get cancelled! (Read 2808 times)

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It's not a foolish assumption.  When I see the shill walls, I do not see a whole lot of volume to accompany them and the price deltas have been tiny, hence any money they are making would be relatively small.  Maybe the strategy is just that, but it seems more like a test than anything else at this point.  If you were going to use a ton of money to move the market wouldn't you test your strategy in stages.  I would want to know that I could manipulate prices before I dumped 10s of thousands of dollars behind and I'd want to know what time of day/week is the best time to do these things.  

Also I think it is a bit arrogant of you to call someone's random "what ifs" foolish.  You must not come from a scientific background where brainstorming and throwing out ideas is an asset, not something to be shot down by some know it all prick.    Just saying.

What makes you think they're not making money buy manipulating the market?  Sounds like a foolish assumption to me.

It's a silly strategy.  They are only playing the market depth.  If they really wanted to play around they would actually buy and sell to move the market and benefit from the change.

Maybe they are just testing trading algorithms, or seeing what else is out there.  Basically add bids/asks to the system, collect data, retract bids/asks, analyze for patterns.  They still have a few weeks of 0 fees, so if this is the case, expect things to get a little crazy near the end of the grace period.

In the last few days the phantom bids have involved a lot more than $50k.  There have been single bids (which were conveniently removed) for more than $100k worth of bitcoins.  Of course, this isn't anything new.  Relatively wealthy MtGox users have been playing with the market using this sort of strategy for at least as long as I've been watching market activity, which has been since the end of April.

I think someone just put in a sell order for 500 BTC at the highest bis and then put in a bid for 1000 BTc at that bid, then retracted it.  Either that or Mtgox live is displaying nonsense data.

That pretty much summed up the issues.


I agree, "real market" was the wrong expression.  MtGox is a very real market and people are getting raped out of very real money.  Non-conventional or unregulated market is a wiser choice of words.

Mt.Gox appears to not have dark pools anymore, unless they only invited a few special people to use them.  Before the crash any order over 1k could be done entirely or in part in the dark pool.  

If we believe that Mt.Gox is essentially honest, then the bogus bid/ask orders are likely the efforts of a team of traders with pooled resources because they involve 50k+ in USD.  I highly doubt any one person would risk having so much in Mt.Gox to begin with, but I could be wrong.  It just strikes me as a really good strategy to team up and move the market.

I think dark pools are gone.  From my account I don't see any way of placing dark pool orders.

Do you have any orders currently in the Mt Gox dark pool?  Or since trading resumed after the security problem?

Not all Gox orders are public. Not all trades are on Gox. Remember this started before Mt. Gox traded BTC. Most of the original adopters traded manually. It's safe to assume that the majority of the currency is in the hands of early adopters who have been holding mass quantities before bitcoin was worth anything. In terms of currency, they have tremendous power to inflate.

Compared to the present price, $3 might seem subpar. However, an early adopter with essentially zero cost trying to sell 50,000 BTC might see it as a good price if it means he doesn't have to crash the market.

I prefer the notion of conventional FOREX market to your use of real market. 

As many here know "painting the tape" by placing misleading buy and sell transactions, is illegal in regulated markets.  However, to the best of my knowledge, placing misleading open orders is not illegal, so long as those bluff orders are not actually filled to "paint the tape".

With today's HFT, i.e. high frequency trading techniques, and especially the ease with which algorithmic bots can be written for the Mt Gox trading API, its no surprise to see misleading open orders, that can be rapidly canceled - by say a bot, in advance of price movement in their direction. 

For example, a market gamer style bot could issue enough bluff bid orders to make it appear that there is a preponderance of inventory for sale.  Conventional technical analysis would suggest to the naive trader that prices should move lower to correct that inventory imbalance.  But the gamer bot simply wants to purchase a small lot of bitcoins are a lower price, then cancel the bluff orders below that price, and sell on the rebound back to the non-bluff inventory balance.

Would more active Mt Gox traders please respond as to whether Mt Gox currently has a dark pool available for open orders.  On another thread, someone said that all open orders currently on Mt Gox are visible.

All day, eeerrrr day.  With no one to stop you.  It's a manipulator's paradise.

My advice: Try to catch the drop. Put small bids ~$1 below current trading and sell the bounce. Don't invest too much at that price because it could drop $10 when Mr. Big is done playing.

You have to keep a couple things in mind.  Even in real markets, the big players always have their orders hidden unless they want them to not be hidden for a specific reason.  If they show them, it's usually not actual size (ice berg order), unless of course they want actual size to show for a specific reason.  Trading market depth is NOT for retail investors.  Honestly, you're better off not looking at it at all.

Furthermore, MtGox is NOT a real exchange.  There is absolutely no regulation or oversight, so you don't even know if the data you're seeing is real at all.  MtGox could be making up that market depth and even pricing data and trading against you, especially since there are so many noob traders in Bitcoin that trading via market depth seems to be the primary trading method of most Bitcoin traders.  The exchanges aren't safe to begin with - your broker should NOT also be your data provider (let alone broker, data provider, and exchange agency), add in no regulation or oversight and it's a real recipe for disaster.  Even if the exchanges were safe, trading market depth is suicide because it's simply too easily manipulated, even in real markets.

Well - I was aware that it can mean nothing - but historically this was a sure sign.  Times are changing.  At least I've learned fast enough to sell before the recent dip.

Did you honestly think it was that easy to trade market depth?

I've got burned at least two times by those - last week quite badly by the 6K buy bid just after the open on Monday.   I had a lot of confidence after the buy bids stacked to over 40K and bought a lot - but when the price started to fall they remove these bids.

Good question.  I intend to record historical open order information to analyse such phenomena.

?  What do a couple of 10 BTC bids matter?

I am more interested in the random large buy/sell orders that appear and vanish before ever being executed.  WTF is up with that?  Why would a single entity be playing the market like that?  It almost looks like they are trying to steer it so they can trade at the peaks and valleys.