by Dave
Here’s a fun chart which appears to show how you scalp a quick 5% from the unwary in bitcoin.
My guess: some actor out there knows what the various bitcoin trading bots like to do – most likely, that involves piling into rallies once they start showing a positive trading pattern. While there isn’t enough data on bitcoin in the daily timeframe to really satisfy an AI, there sure is on the 5m timeframe.
So our manipulator kicks off a rally, waits for the bots to start buying heavily (and he can tell this by watching the price & volume action), and then rings the cash register, dumping a much larger number of bitcoins at point #2 than he did to start the rally at point #1.
Perhaps he was holding a lot of bitcoins he bought at higher prices, and just wanted to kick the price higher so he could get out even.
The fun thing about this chart is that price almost symmetrically reversed the move just 4 hours later.
If you saw this behavior in a gold chart, what would you think? “Markets are fair?” Yeah, I bet you’d think that.
