I used to write trading systems for market makers, and still have friends in the business. I also have friends who are professors, including a finance professor. Trading is not really about market knowledge; it's a skill and an orientation. Being a professor is much more about knowledge, but it's also about skills and orientation. They're different kinds of people, doing very different work.
Your "the only people who can possibly understand this are the ones who agree with me" approach is essentially religious thinking. You're making an argument from authority, except the only cited expert is you, an anonymous person with no credentials and no provable experience.
This applies to journalism at large, but for market and trading analysis in particular, professors fit into this category much more than in other fields (such as engineering, where there is still a disconnect between academia and industry). In trading, anyone who truly understands the market at such a powerful level is using that knowledge to make money. It's a complex adaptive system, so publishing financially actionable research in the field is usually pointless because the market adapts. In my anecdotal experience, even engineers / employees of quant funds like yourself do not often really understand the market when they were focused on some specific piece of infrastructure / a part of someone else's larger design. When left alone without the infrastructure and systems they were used to, breaking even is often their best case scenario.
But this is all beside the point. Instead of personal attacks, getting defensive, and bowing to credentials, consider thinking for yourself and addressing the content, if you reply.
Source: I'm an anonymous professional trader who beats the market.
> Meanwhile you don't seem to understand why it is remarkable that the market can absorb a huge order that should move the market because of its sheer size while much smaller order have a much larger impact.
Is the concept of an orderbook so foreign to non-finance/math people? Firstly, 13k is not a "huge" order. Secondly, someone clearly just had a somewhat large maker order placed at $1 for the example cited which absorbed a few orders, and the book was thinner for a subsequent price movement (liquidity vacuum). Explained by the market being low volume, low volatility, likely dominated by a handful of traders/algos, and plain old random variation (individual players' orders have a more significant effect in low volume markets like Tether/USD). It's also important to note that psychological price levels (like 1.0) tend to accumulate larger walls as a result of human nature. For Tether in particular, it makes sense that the price never breaches 1.0. It's an easy short above 1.0, as it is impossible for Tether to ever become worth more than the price it is pegged at, whereas it could become worth less if it were insolvent. So there is probably a huge wall sitting there on every exchange.