Re:'Picasso', the Painter on GDAX?
by xorcist on Monday December 25, 2017 @07:30AM
(#16003887)
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.
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.