Topic: No trade too small (6 BTC) for 'them' to come after. (Read 1621 times)

Nope. Not a bullseye painted on me....

Just that their bot calculated....

Bucket Shop Volume - Real Volume + Stop Orders = Profit....

and off the bot went, after my, and no doubt a few other hapless traders orders.......

But from the several hundred BTC of volume that it took to run my Stop....how much was actually 'real'. I am thinking..not nearly as much as we may like to think.....Of course the exchange can plough through a few hundred worth of 'volume', if only 10% of it is actually orders from real (non exchange) customers and their is a juicy clutch of Stop Orders needing picked....

....these exchanges are bucket shops. Not only did they steal a few bucks from me by Running my Stop, they pervented me taking a considerable amount more money from them. Even if we are just talking little trades for pennies, as mine was, multiply that by 20 or 30 per day, and it soon adds up to a substantial income stream...not to mention substantial loss prevention...(they dont Stop Run people who are in losing trades...the market will take care of them all by itself).

Nearly a good trade Mat. I think you have makings of a good trader. Keep your emotions in check. May the force be with you.

Hardly. The potential gain for Bitfinex would have been ([stop execution price] - [average buy price for position closed]) * 6 BTC. Since matthecat says he was looking to scalp a move on the order of 10 usd, I think it's pretty clear we're talking a maximum of a few hundred USD at the very most here.

He is just claiming the situation is so bad exchanges are gaming the price to steal 6 BTC......  $2,300.00 .... ...

Exchanges giving out stop loss info and people moving on it is not something new..

They DID NOT go after him.. they went after $2k.... ...

What can I say, the odds of winning with the bitcoin market is getting worse for everyone. One should not forget, that this isn't simply a zero-sum game.
A large part of the speculator money is flowing to mining, to develop and build faster ASICs and to pay the electric bills. This part has gone out of proportion since 2014 Q4, when the price took a deep plunge, but the mining sector kept expanding and overheating. Most of the new coins are sold OTC to professional traders who will use their experience + the weight of their wealth to overplay most.
All this makes the market environment very hostile, with wealth leaking out and the competition being strong. Small players can only make their bets blind, because they don't have the information processing capabilities of their competition, nor the weight of their available wealth.
You'll have better odds with alts, that have smaller markets. If you properly learn a new smaller market, then you'll have much better odds and you have more control of the outcome.

In my eyes, the bitcoin market is currently extremely fragile and a catastrophic collapse of value is probable. My main surprise is that it already hasn't happened yet. This could be because of the corrupt exchanges that have brought non existent money into the market, like MtGox did. When Karpeles started buying bitcoins with willybot and dollars he didn't actually have, then this caused the rise of 2014 Q4. Now I think that the non-existent wealth is only used to keep the price from a collapse, because "any minute now big investor money will start flowing into the market, and we can cover our previous losses!!1".
Greed makes people stupid like that..

You realize, matthecat, that what you're saying is that Bitfinex has painted a bullseye on you, specifically. Obviously there are bigger fish to fry out there if they're stop-hunting on their own exchange. Surely even when you got stopped out, there must have been bigger orders that could have gotten the same treatment. So why did they go after you?

Is it that you have the mark of death on you? Or is it that you're just seeing things that aren't there?

We are talking about non-hodl issues here. We like to preserve capital

Ain't that the truth :S..

Any REAL action in buying and dear lord..

If you have to use a stop order then your exposure is too high 

Precisely.

This was a scalp trade, targeting just a $10 move, off a point that *should* have been the top. Stops had to be tight, because r/r was tight. But anyone buying any amount of Bitcoin (for the 'right' reasons) post the time where I shorted, would have needed to have had their fucking head read. Very weak rise up to $406, with raging divergence confirming on 15 min charts. Spot also tagged 61.8% range Short RLZ.

However, it didn't work on this occassion, because the whole BTC market actually moved against my 6 BTC Stop Order, which I find utterly astonishing. Or should I say, Bitfinex moved against my position, and other markets mimicked thier trading. Had I not placed my trade or my Stop Order rather, then the market would never have moved up one last gasp beyond the $406.15 high, when momentum was clearly retreating.

Like I say, no position too small for 'them' to come after.

I can only conclude that much of the volume on all exchanges is just fakery. 'Padding' to give traders the impression that they are playing against the market, other than the reality which is they are playing against the Bucket Shops, and the Bucket Shops has tricks up its sleave to ensure it is the favourite to win.

They did price analysis and used trading strategies to determine their entry and exit points.

It sucks when they were just a little bit too narrow and doesn't always work for bitcoin, hence the crying.

Why oh why do people come here to cry about their trading decisions?  The market is impersonal and doesn't give a fuck about you and there's no conspiracy.

Something I would look into is how far, on average, the market is pushed beyond typical S/L levels. If it's say 1.5%, then start setting stops at 2%. It still gets you out, but not on hunted levels and not nearly as often (or easily and cheaply). If the price is destined to move against your position, it will still get hit even outside of the logical S/L band. 2% is easy to make up.

When you first posted this thread, I was going to make the comment that your stops are too tight for Bitcoin. FOREX is a different story when liquidity is so massive. Bitcoin is just too shallow to run excessively tight stops. I almost never use stops. I manage risk by position size and if I end up too heavy one way, I babysit. If you can't babysit, then go a little lighter. I learned a long time ago that stops are terribad in Bitcoin (Set it for 400 and it executes at 406...) so eff'em. Mental stops FTW!

Seems like almost everything is possible in BTC world 

It's OK to kick yourself for a few minutes, but not longer than that.

Being right consistently on market direction can make one feel overconfident.

In short term trading, execution accounts for a large portion of total returns.

Overconfidence can encourage one to take trades where the setup isn't right.  The direction & market dynamics may be correctly assessed, but the setup isn't right.

As a friend of mine, one of the greatest, most well-known traders of the past 50 years told me, the hardest part of trading is knowing when to sit on your hands.

Can't trade Short without margin......


I just think I seriously lack the midas touch. I see my trade is well on its way to coming good.....felt the instinct to hit it again...depsite Finex just mugging me a few hours ago....

...but I resisted....and low n behold.....I shoulda just went with it, as fucking usual.


Instinctively take the trades when shouldn't, sit out the ones that I should......like their is a demon in my head desperately seeking failure.

Then you have to trade without stoploss and without margin, so you can wait until the market turns and scalp here and there some profit. That's atleast how I am doing it. (Which was pretty successful for me in the last 5 months)

Edit: And yes, your calls were really good recently. You just ended always somehow on the wrong side of the market in an uncomfortable position. (because of stoploss triggered etc )

I thought you had started trading on one of the Chinese exchnges. They are dodgy, but bitfinex is worse. I found it so flaky I stopped using it ages ago. They lost track of who owned what six months ago, and I think it was due to their database getting corrupted. I had coins appearing in my account that shouldn't have been there, then disappearing again.

You know what.....back when I first noticed that Finex had a very nasty habit of Running Stops, I done just that.....


.....I traded short without Stops....and one day, on a trade where my target never quite hit and the market came back against my position, violently, I sat stubbornly in my position, waiting on market to come back to my break even level, I ended up leaving that trade minus $3500. Had I not left it when I did, I would have got margin called quite literally, with the very last dollar of upside before the market retraced, right back down to my Short trade entry point.

Most of my losing trades, that I lose in cos my Stop gets triggered, turn into winners a day or so later........but I can never again, take the risk of trading without Stops.

and that is all BTC is at the moment btw...whales pushing spot price around, triggering traders Stop Orders, and trying to get them to pile in and out of BTC at bad entry points in the market.



I find that I am good at predicting the general market direction, but fucking awful at entering and exiting trades.

I may well have opted to Short at 407 instead of 404.50, but then my Stop Order wouldn't have been set at $407.11, and the Finex bots would have had no reason to take the market up there and my trade would not have been triggered....which I suppose is better than having these cunts practically dip into my account and steal from me.

If you understand the market dynamics so well, why did you short at 404.50 and cover at 407 instead of the other way round?
In your sig you refer to BFX as "stealing", yet you keep trading with them?