I understand continuing to use Gox as I've been using them since the very beginning, but I certainly wouldn't be sending them additional $ if I wanted to buy BTC in the last few months.
Is this perhaps USD that was always there, but not on the order book? Or are folks really sending new $ there? Perhaps the Second Market guys? Other large investors? I could see them not going to Bitstamp due the lack of liquidity. I still believe (no evidence) that Gox has private deals with large players for USD withdrawals. But they can't risk opening up that faucet to everyone and having it turned off until their issues with the US Gov and CoinLab are addressed.
One word: Volume.
Despite gox's problem, they have the highest volume and the most amount of experience handling the most amount of money. You could probably trust bitstamp with that much money, but good luck buying a million dollars without radically changing the price and losing to slippage.
Gox has problems, but they always sort them out- supposidly the larger you are a client, the faster they sort things out too. :-)
Agreed. There are a lot of old traders and early adopter coins there. Despite their issues, they were first in the game and have the most market depth to purchase/trade large amounts of coins. I would not be surprised at all to hear they have private deals with big investors.