RE: Bad Trades on Kraken!
Hi @steematt The error occurred on two trades. The start time of the two trades was two hours apart.
After it went wrong on the first trade, but before the second trade, I did a test. The test was with 0.001 bitcoin. About $7.50. I set a price limit at $3'300. Nothing went wrong it traded at the market price of around $7470.
As a result of the test, I was confident that the first rogue trade was a one-off. Therefore I decided to let the second trade go through.
The test was identical to the error trades except for two details;
In the test my limit was already well below market. For the two which went wrong, the limit was slightly higher than the market when I entered the order.
The second difference is that when I entered the original order the start time was several hours away. for the test the start time was only several minutes away.
The key point is that it should be impossible for a normal trade to be executed outside of the bid-ask spread. Parts of the trade should be executed at the first bid price, then the second bid price and so-on.
Well you're cool, calm, and systematic about it, which will keep any losses under control. If it was a bug, they should credit you back, although that might take a while. I'm sure their IT Helpdesk is drowning with requests, and may need to investigate the system first, but you did the right thing by contacting them immediately to get up higher on their queue. I wonder if there's an escalation email distribution you may be able to find on reddit or elsewhere that can get you faster responses. I've found that to be helpful with my mining services.
To tell the truth, having looked at what people on Redditt have to say, I am not terribly optimistic of a rapid reply.
It's disappointing to miss part of the profit, but more disappointing that I can't trust the software for a while. Kraken has been around quite a while and I would have expected things to be less buggy by now.