Topic: serious discussion on the strategy of the manipulator. Please no flame posts - page 5. (Read 7872 times)

Great charts.
Keep up the fantadtic work

Cool charts, how do you sample the data? Do you just take a snapshot of the depth once every while, or do you subscribe to some kind of streaming updates?

(I ask this because I have market depth snapshots going back quite a long time, but your resolution seems to be to good to use this approach unless you flood the exchange :-)

Note that those are at 6.50, 6.75, 7.00, plus a little bit of a ramp in front of each.  Those are psychological numbers (especially 7, where the big jump is), and the ramps are scalpers doing their thing.

Here's where they are on my chart:



Most of the time the walls are sitting on psychological numbers (noobs), or on the trade line +/- (commission + profit, often in .05 steps like was mentioned before) (arbitrage traders and market makers).  The market makers bounce back and forth a bit as their inventory moves; arbitrageurs just fill back in every time they're bought through, initially moving in inventory from their outside limits, and then from other exchanges after 6 confirms.

All that's normal market behavior.  If you're looking for manipulation, you need to spot where there's some unusually large walls that mysteriously appear and disappear outside of those conditions.

The wall is joke for those at the Sibo...Its pocket money.

I am not sure, but I suspect these.

All right, last one unless there are any requests:



A nice view of the latest rally.  9/17 through now, 5 minute resolution, $4 to $8.

Do you see the manipulator?

It's my own software.  I wrote it while designing a bot.

Those limits are there due to US federal KYC regulations.  If you follow MtGox's KYC policy and send them ID and proof of address, you can have those limits lifted.

The manipulator, or manipulators really don't want the price to go over 7... 16000BTC wall... wtf

How are you making those graphs?

Here's another one:



9/15, the day of the last 25k dump.  24 hours @ 1 minute resolution.  $3-$7.

These charts aren't very useful for trading except on very short time scales, but you can learn a lot of important things about limit orders, bots, market psychology, and as a bit of a surprise to me, just how much trading seems to be done by hand.  HFT in this world happens on a scale of minutes, not milliseconds.


Perhaps I'll post some of that tomorrow.

Nice, thanks.  BTW, your chart is a very pleasant change from what normally pops up around here, just needs to be going up instead of down.

8/1 on the left, today on the right.  $4 at the bottom, $14 at the top.

Just curious (and too lazy to do the pixel math) how far does this go back...it's interesting and very informative.  I am glad to see someone is on their toes about the data tracking...btccharts is about as far as I go, which is also why I don't trade much.

I'll bet you haven't seen a lot of charts like that.    Resolution is 1hr/px X, $0.01/px Y.  Stare at it long enough and you'll start seeing when the major players move in and out of the market.  

Edit:  Also, the funny pixelation you see around the trade line isn't JPEGing.  This is a PNG, pixel-perfect.  That's all real data.

Well, you get the point...err nvm, stricken from the record! XD

Can there ever be unintentional market movements?

I've often wondered this same thing! If you have enough in each account, you wouldn't have to worry about "today's trades"! There could be an account for "wall trickery" as storage, and a primary for the execution!

As for a conspiracy? I'm a paranoid person! Everyone is out to get me! So, I calls it like I sees it! And, some of the movement I've seen (not price swings) in the walls inching across the chart, someone is obviously doing this intentionally!

Evidence against: MtGox already makes $10K-$1000K a day from its fees.
Evidence for: MtGox won't let you withdraw more than 100BC a day and more than $1000 a day (max $10,000 a month) so The Manipulator will have trouble cashing his investment in using only a small number of accounts, so a non-MtGox manipulator would use lots of accounts and not have all his money and coins t in one account and the buy and sell walls that are huge that show someone is manipulating them I've seen them appear and dissapear at the exact same time, never incrementally.

Bitcoin's price can move rather rapidly.  You're assuming one set (one bid wall) is the right trading approach and the right price.  Maybe various people have different opinions about where the price is going.  Some may put bids in at $5.45, some at $5.40, others may prefer $5.30.  Prices are not set by one person (the alleged manipulator).


It's about price volatility again.  Someone fires 20k bitcoins into the bids and fulfills many of the orders.  I regularly put staggered bids and asks onto MtGox for this very reason.  You would see my bids as manipulation.  I see it as smart hedging against risk and taking advantage of market volatility when it occurs.  If the price starts falling because people are selling like mad then I withdraw my bids in anticipation of a lower price.  That's not manipulating the market.  That's just not being stupid.


Markets don't really work like that.  Have a look at share trading and you'll always see a lot of 'depth': bids and asks way above and below the current spot price.  If everyone is only buying at the spot price than the spot price isn't going to move.  People can't see how much interest there is in the market.  Someone wanting to sell 20k of bitcoins would see only a few dozen being traded at the current spot price.  Could they sell those 20k in one hit without market depth?  They couldn't.

I get the feeling that this mysterious 'manipulator' (always singular, always one person) is being blamed for odd market trading, and even blamed for bitcoin's continuous flagging price.  It all sounds a little like a conspiracy theory with very little evidence.