Thanks for the explanation. However,
1. Bitcoinica is not a bucket shop, it's a brokerage. All the hedging will take place if our clients place orders in a particular direction. The spread seems high now, but will be eventually lower.
2. We don't bet against our clients. We never want them to lose. There's no incentive to do that.
3. There are large scale transactions coming in Bitcoinica. First day we got 3700+ BTC, ranked number 3 among all trading platforms. Bitcoinica has more than 5% of total Bitcoin/USD trades. A bucket shop can't survive this amount of volume.
4. Because of stop orders and margin calls, we are partly responsible for the crash. Our orders are already influencing the market.
5. I'm not a Singapore citizen. I just live here. Thank you for teaching me the culture.
I have nothing to add, I just wanted to preserve the above post in a quote agains possible later editions. As the item (4) shows, we now have an official "Boy plunger of Singapore (but not a citizen of Singapore)", who had engineered one of the bigest daily percentage drops in the history of BTC vs. USD trading.