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When the news went out that BCash is being listed, the price on Bittrex shot up to $5k and then started settling down at around $4k. At that exact time, the pri

by asenna 9y ago

When the news went out that BCash is being listed, the price on Bittrex shot up to $5k and then started settling down at around $4k. At that exact time, the price on Gdax was showing over $9.5k after which they halted trading for the day. I am with the author on this one, no human with good intentions would put a buy order at that price.

jlavine 9y ago
GDAX started market trading way too soon, after a surprise launch of BCH trading. The momentary price spike could simply have resulted from people making unwise market orders without enough sell limits yet in place. GDAX shut down trading a second afterward, until the following day, when they allowed more time for limit orders to build up before opening market trading.
xorcist 9y ago
That there is software trading these order books is not disputed. They even publish APIs for the purpose. However the argument that no human would place a buy order at a significant premium over market value is not a good one. Many people issue market buy orders. (Why? Some exchanges prioritize them over limit orders. That might be one reason. Another might be that Coinbase's customers aren't predominantly day traders.) Coinbase is known to have issues with their trading engine. They have outages every time there are large market movements. They can be very slow to execute places orders and there have been spurious reports of people having their orders executed out of order. If the order book was empty, the execution engine lagging the user interface considerably, and many people placing market buy orders, this outcome is expected. Coinbase probably did the right thing to disable trading for a while. If a trading engine that could keep up with the user interface was a possibility for them that would probably have happened years ago.
3solarmasses 9y ago
Just because seemingly rational humans wouldn't buy at such a price isn't the same as "no human would buy." I remember reading tweets of someone angry at coinbase because they bought a ton at $8000 and tried to sell at $9000 but was unable to. Bitfinexed makes a lot of outrageous leaps in logic.

by asenna 9y ago

jlavine 9y ago

GDAX started market trading way too soon, after a surprise launch of BCH trading. The momentary price spike could simply have resulted from people making unwise market orders without enough sell limits yet in place. GDAX shut down trading a second afterward, until the following day, when they allowed more time for limit orders to build up before opening market trading.

xorcist 9y ago

That there is software trading these order books is not disputed. They even publish APIs for the purpose. However the argument that no human would place a buy order at a significant premium over market value is not a good one. Many people issue market buy orders. (Why? Some exchanges prioritize them over limit orders. That might be one reason. Another might be that Coinbase's customers aren't predominantly day traders.) Coinbase is known to have issues with their trading engine. They have outages every time there are large market movements. They can be very slow to execute places orders and there have been spurious reports of people having their orders executed out of order. If the order book was empty, the execution engine lagging the user interface considerably, and many people placing market buy orders, this outcome is expected. Coinbase probably did the right thing to disable trading for a while. If a trading engine that could keep up with the user interface was a possibility for them that would probably have happened years ago.

3solarmasses 9y ago

Just because seemingly rational humans wouldn't buy at such a price isn't the same as "no human would buy." I remember reading tweets of someone angry at coinbase because they bought a ton at $8000 and tried to sell at $9000 but was unable to. Bitfinexed makes a lot of outrageous leaps in logic.