Bitshares Trading Diary, Day 16: Oof!

If your coin attracts the attention of Poloniex speculators, if your favorite alt becomes a subject of regular chatter, it's a double-edged sword. A powerful sword that cuts through a lot of sell orders, which allows the coin to leap, but also slices through a lot of buy orders - which induces your coin to plummet. Yesterday, when I enthused "It's Happening!" we enjoyed the first side of the blade. Today, we endured the second.

Impatience

I honestly didn't realize that Polo punters had such a short time horizon. The Peerplays sharedrop snapshot window starts tomorrow, fer Gawd's sake! I really thought they'd wait another day or two. As the two-day chart screenshot at 6 PM Eastern time shows:

a lot of them apparently didn't. The 24-hour volume is less than yesterday's, but not much less. The chart shows a period of drifting, where folks were waiting to see what would happen, punctuated by stings of dumping. For all I know, those three high-volume plummets decorated with candlestick red were caused by stop-loss orders placed at close-to-the-same prices that hit the market all at once. A stop-loss order is a standby sell order that sells into the buybook at the moment the asset hits the specified stop-loss price. When the activation of one stop-loss order triggers another - well, you can guess what happens. During the crisis of '08' when I was watching the stock market, I actually saw a "flash crash" of a stock that was caused by cascading stops. It was the oddest thing: the stock was about $1.70 but began plummeting; I thought there was something wrong with my browser or Yahoo! Finance. After hitting a buck, the thing shot right back up to where it was. In less than a minute, the thing had made a whirlwind round trip to a 40% loss and right back. Since bot trading was not widely used back then, the only cause I could figure was stop-loss orders triggering each other until the selling frenzy exhausted itself. My best guess is, that's what happened to Bitshares today.

As for where the Poloniex punters have redirected their funds, I have no idea. The usual hotties all cooled off today: Factom was down by double digits. Even Monero is just hanging there, on fairly low volume compared to the last few days. NXT, Bitcrystals and Omni are having good runs, but on three-digit volumes. Maybe the punters went over there.

Will they come back to Bitshares tomorrow? Who knows?

Lesson Of The Day

Short-term speculators bring turbulence, and all-too-many speculators are short term. As on a plane, turbulence has to be waited out.

Special Notes:

I'm winding up this diary tomorrow - the Big Day - because I'm gong to be writing on other subjects. A special thanks to everyone who gave me feedback!

Also, if you haven't already: if you have any Bitshares on a centralized exchange, withdraw them to your Bitshares or Open Ledger wallet; otherwise you will not qualify for the sharedrop. (Yes, this is also a note-to-self!)

Thanks (again) for reading, upvoting and commenting. See you tomorrow for The Final Day...