I will try to make this a short entry, straight to the point.
As you can see from the image, Yesterday ETH fell on GDAX from over 300$ to 0.1$.
WHAT EXACTLY HAPPENED?
I'm pretty sure most people already know what happened.
Someone (either a person or group of persons) dumped around 30m$ worth of ETH to the market, eating THE WHOLE ORDER BOOK.
I will not question if it was intentional manipulation, a fat finger, a bug, or any other thing.
I want to focus on the consequences of this movement, which showed me that most of us are not really mentally prepared to deal with a decentralized, free market.
The main two reasons why the price went down so drastically are the following:
People operating on Margin
It is very important to clarify that in order to buy or sell using margin, what you do is borrow money from someone else to be able to invest with more money than you have. This way you increase both your risk and your potential reward.People setting stop losses.
Stop loss is a way to protect yourself, so that you can set a maximum loss you are willing to take before leaving the market.
As sad as it is that so many people got wiped out, the kind of comments I've seen have shown me that we are possibly not ready for what cryptocurrencies and unregulated exchanges bring to the table.
So many people are now trying to find a way to reverse the trades (which obviously cannot be done), for what they feel was unfair towards them.
For those using margin, there is one thing that you need to understand. When you borrow someone else's money at a fixed interest rate, the intermediary's (GDAX in this case) main task is to protect the person who lend you money.
Therefore, it does not matter if you had placed a stop loss, if you wanted to sell, if you thought the market would recover and go back up. What matters is that at some point, the funds were at risk, and according to the terms set by GDAX, which you agreed to, your position got liquidated BEFORE you lost the lender's money and gave GDAX the hot potato.
For those using a stop loss, no matter at what price, you need to understand that these transactions, whether if they are made on purpose or unintentionally, being equal or bigger than the total buy order book, accept each and every buy offer available.
It is an implied risk of trading without free market rules.
I do not want people to take this personally, and I do really feel for those who lost money, but this is exactly what happens when there is no governing entity to set rules on how to play the game, and this is what happens in unregulated markets.
So my question is,
ARE WE REALLY READY FOR THIS?, DO WE REALLY WANT THIS KIND OF FREEDOM?
