Taking a cue from your intro, since you’re only going to upvote and read my comment if it’s related to the video you posted, I might as well do that. There’s no way anyone is going to care about my comment if I start talking about something else, it matter how interesting it is.

You talked about pre set LIMIT sell orders on the exchange. If I understand you right, this is what people refer to when traders “set their stops” or at least one way to do so.

I know volume and liquidity is important for a healthy market. An order book is there to help the exchange fill orders.

Here are a few things I’ve learned trading crypto over the past couple of years:

• The Exchange makes money when you trade, not when you make money
• Its in the Exchange’s best interest for you to feel the urge to trade
• The order book is transparent
• Therefore, any LIMIT sell orders on the exchange are left wide open for anyone to see. These are also known as “Stop Loss Orders”. Ie, where would I get out of a coin?
• The mechanics of the order book is NOT transparent.
• Therefore, it is possible that some users, governments or exchange admins have visibility or power over some orders that I do not have. It is unverifiable since it is a centralized system
• Since the order book and therefore the stop loss orders are open for everyone to see, whales can go hunting for snacks and gobble them up.
• Since the exchange’s motives and power are aligned but not in balance with the customer’s motives and power, they are to be under suspicion. The exchange has more money than the whales and users and their wallets are many times not visible. They can wipe the order books and reap the fees doing it.

Conclusion: this is why I use algorithmic trading to put my stop losses, if I use them, off the exchange and invisible to the order book. Using the same principles of Bitcoin itself, I “keep my own keys” as it were, to my sell orders.

I use strategies like trailing stop losses as coins move upward in price, so if a coin moves past my pre-determined profit target, as long as it keeps going up, I let it. But if it drops down a little, then sell it.

But I don’t want that order to be sitting visible on the exchange to be scooped up like I’m plankton to be eaten by a whale.

I know my role. I’m swimming with whales. I’m moved by the waves made by the whales. But I don’t want to be eaten.

Full disclosure: I’m biased and my motivation is to sell algorithmic trading software and educate people about them. So I cannot be trusted either.

Re: another reason for the dip

The institutional angle has been mentioned several times but one piece of possible evidence is the CBOE 2018 Expiration calendar. The 15th is a new cycle and the 14th was the “Last Day to trade expiring Standard AM-settled equity index options”

How convenient, then, that right before this deadline of the last possible window to trade these equity index options for CBOE, for the period where BAKKT is going to happen and the institutional money is going to come in and it’ll be post-Bitcoin Cash split and while Coinbase launches dozens of coins and while everyone is abandoning the stock market for crypto and while Fidelity opens more 42k and IRA money to crypto options and I’m sure if I thought about it, I could come up with half dozen REALLY good examples of the herd coming in.

So, if I had a lot of money, not a lot of scruples, and wanted to open a lot of futures contracts, maybe, just maybe, I’d move the price down right at the contract start price.

Then I’d make sure the price jumped up quite a bit during that contract period.

Everyone with me so far?