I just zoomed in to the 1m chart and it seems as though someone did a market sell of ~590 bitcoin. That's like diving into the shallow end of a pool.
... who would do such a thing?
It could be a dumb mistake. Flash crashes can be really nice if you have the right buy order.
When I used to trade an exchange a lot I’d put something like 70% of my balance on a stupid low order and then trade with the rest, just as a way of separating my funds..
I would also put in stupid low orders before I went to sleep, or quit..
I'm still using this strategy, or at least still trying. I always prefer to have 50%+ liquidity locked into some hideously low buy order, just in case. When it works it's an amazing get rich quick scheme!
Though currently only using Binance and liquidity is too high for it to work with common trading pairs, needs to be done on some shit exchange like Kraken or Bitstamp I imagine.
We always figured somebody screwed up and missed a decimal, or accidentally put one too many or one too few numbers in their order..
Like if that guy was trying to place that sell at 69800, but accidentally missed a zero and sold at 6980, that’s what you’d see on the charts..
It happens..
Also known as fat fingered discounts
Yeah, look down the books and put it just just above a big wall..
That's indeed always the trick
Or least go for "the" big wall, as opposed to a big wall.
Maker bots are very good these days and create a lot of liquidity and their is just a lot more liquidity in general these days than their used to be..
Bots don't appear to reduce the chance of flash crashes though, at least not on Bitstamp very recently, if anything they encourage these flash crashes.
The algorithms just "help" to drive the price back up usually within millisecond(s).
Previously it'd take a few minutes for "real-ish life traders" to buy the price back up to a reasonable level, now it all happens in a blink of an eye as you probably know, usually within a second or a few, before traders can place buy or sell orders themselves most notably. The relevance is the bots will always allow the price to crash (no doubt triggering their stop losses as well), but immediately buy back once the selling has ended (ie the backlog of stop losses cleared through) or there is sign of buying strength. The sign of buying strength is simply the fastest or most sophisticated algo bot that first buys the lows
In summary it seems bots help the price to "stabilise" back to it's previous un-crashed value, but not before selling the drop and buying the lows. Probably being responsible for a fair few flash crashes as well.
It mainly just means traders using stop losses (nearly all of them) get stopped out and lose their positions