Trading vs. bots and making 20% profit
Over the weekend the price of my MARC coins dropped from 10.000 Satoshi by about 35% to 6.500 Satoshi. As I was on Chinese New Year’s holiday I didn’t take note of the dump, until it had already happened. Back in the office I looked at what happened to the price and could be the reason.
An attentive trader mentioned on Discord that the price was being manipulated by trading bots, exploiting the the average Joe’s laziness of looking into the exchanges order book and selling right into the bots bids and asks.
“Looking at the MARC market on Crypto-Bridge via the bitshares explorer, two bots (cryptobridge-marketmaker and kaldera56) are really driving the price down. Legitimate sellers are dumping into their buy orders. The bot immediately puts a sell order on the coins it just bought and puts in another buy order lower than the one before. […] Look at all of cryptobridge-marketmaker orders on both sides of the order book.”
cryptobridge orderbook via bitshares explorer
Naturally I went and looked at the orderbook myself and saw the pattern unfolding in front of me, and tried to fight the machines. As the bots were only dealing with minuscule amounts of 0.3 MARC, roughly $ 0.06, per order it was a fight which didn’t involve too much financial risk. I bought all the tiny sell-orders up and bought into the next limit order sell-wall so that the market price shown on the exchange would jump up. I didn’t never sold into the bots sales orders. Well, at least not until I had driven the bid price up again by roughly 20% or 1.200 Satoshi per coin.
To reward myself for bringing up the price the nicely I finally rewarded myself by selling of around 600 MARC at a mean price of 7.000 Satoshi. While I’m not keen on selling my position in MARC I was excited by my ability to move the market. After roughly 4 hours of pereptually clicking and buying tiny amounts of MARC from the bots I made about $200. Had I been selling my coins at the market price 4 hours earlier I would have made roughly $50 dollars less. While this approach is not necessary worth my time, it was fun and I am definitely going to look out for greater opportunities to move the market and profit from it.