Polo shows a volume of 1000+ btc on the day the 0.01 peak was hit. Mintpal data is unavailable but I bet that wasn't less than half the polo volume. So approx 1500btc worth of coins traded. Quite a lot actually
Not all those traded at 0.01, but close. Still, I'm surprised to learn it was that much. I never saw the 1000+ BTC volume numbers on Polo, I guess I just wasn't paying very close attention. Crazy times.
1011 BTC worth of XMR (118,071 XMR) was traded at the average price of 0.00856 BTC/XMR that day. If you fantasize about someone being able to buy low and sell at the peak, please use the average instead of the peak for sums that are <5% of the daily volume (ie max 6,000 XMR). If the sum is larger, you need to apply a discount to the daily average to get an actionable figure. It is hardly possible that a peak in price would have coincided to one player selling more than 10% of the volume anyway.
Thus a well-executed swing trade would have been possible to buy at about 0.00220 and sell 0.00856, for the amount of 6,000 XMR. This would have yielded BTC38, given perfect timing on both ends.
So your saying that nobody sold more than 6k at a price above 0.00856. Despite the price being above that figure for 8+ hours, there being several 100 btc volume and the fact as I said there was around the same sort of volume on mintpal (in fact if I remember rightly mintpal hit higher than 0.01)
LOL
People were buying AND MINING a lot lower than 0.0022 for a significant period of time. Lets also not forget there was a chance to 2x - 3x your money during 2-4 swings between 0.001 and 0.002 and 2 swings between 0.003 and 0.008.