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The 3 Types of Cryptocurrency Traders that are Kicking Your Butt
Traders Magazine Online News, July 2, 2018
For an investor to outperform the market, someone else must underperform. That is a simple arithmetic fact.
In a fair and regulated environment, investors have equal access to information. Winners and losers are determined by whoever can make a better prediction.
But cryptocurrency is the wild, wild west. Market participants don’t play fair and they can profit at the expense of others.
Here are the three types of traders that are kicking your ass
Insider Traders
Under Rule 10b5–1, the SEC defines insider trading as “any securities transaction made when the person behind the trade is aware of nonpublic material information.” Insider trading is illegal in almost all traditional markets. In a research paper published in 2010, Qin Lei found empirical evidence that insiders were able to consistently beat the stock market.
Over the last year, we’ve seen many high-profile cases of insider trading in the cryptocurrency market.
Coinbase?—?The Bitcoin Cash Incident
On December 19, 2017, Coinbase tweeted it would add Bitcoin Cash to its exchange. But before the announcement was made public, both the trading volume and the price of Bitcoin Cash suspiciously surged.
BCH pump before the announcement. Even trading on insider tips are considered a violation in traditional markets
On March 1, Coinbase was hit with a class action lawsuit. The full court document is available here.
South Korea Financial Supervisory Service (FSS)
Even regulators are being investigated for insider trading. Korean FSS officials knew ahead of time that new cryptocurrency trading restrictions would be put in place. Yet, they still made trades before the announcement.
The chief of the FSS, Choi Hyung-sik, confirmed on Jan. 18 that trading violations had occurred. Despite being caught red-handed, another FSS official responded that there was technically “no code of ethics or conduct for virtual currencies and therefore difficult to issue any punishment.”
The examples mentioned above are just a few high-profile cases. Insider trading runs rampant in the cryptocurrency space. Very often, prices and trading volumes will pump right before an exchange announces a new coin.
To many, insider trading is no longer a surprise but rather something that “just happens” in an unregulated market.
Whales
Not the Moby Dick kind
A whale is simply a colloquial way to describe an investor who is able to manipulate markets by mobilizing large amounts of capital.
Most crypto investors treat whales like the boogeyman. They’ve never had a personal encounter, but swear that whales are responsible for large market swings everywhere.
In some cases there is strong evidence indicating that they are right. Recently, academic research has come out showing that large-scale price manipulation does happen. Here’s an example from 2013, where a single entity was largely responsible for pushing the price of Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000 in two months. Another paper that came out last week shows how large amounts of USDT was used to manipulate Bitcoin prices.
Here are a few techniques whales use to manipulate price.
Stop-loss hunting
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