Someone posted that the data they have shows a whole raft of orders being executed from $600 right through to $608.13. But that doesn't change the fact that my stop loss was just a shade above $600, yet never got triggered until the very top spike of those front-run and repackaged grouped together 319 BTC orders. that took price to $608.13, the exact price where my stop orders were triggered, taking me right away from break even territory and right into the red. It was only a small trade. It would only ever have been a small trade as my trust for Bitfinex evaporated quite some time ago. This is far from being the first time I have seen this sort of shit on this exchange.
My possible explanation would be like this:
buys below market price executes on priority over stop losses (which is quite logical)
I.e. if there is sell order 30BTC at 600 and sell order 20BTC at 602 and sell orer 10BTC and 608
your stop loss for short 6BTC position placed at 601
Now someone executes buy @599 for 52BTC
he got filled on priority as 30@600+20@602 +2@608
then stop losses start being filled
say there is only one stop loss and it's yours, then you will get 6@608
and there will be 2BTC sell order left @ 608
Such an explanation would make sense. But I would add to that explanation, that the whale market buyer(s):
a) Has front running access
b) Knows where the bulk of the Stops are
c) Probably then sells to the Stops at a mark-up
and
d) Is probably the exchange itself
I was watching the trades happening, with palm over face with resigned sigh as I watched the obvious rally engineered to take out short traders but I have had one very bad experience trading with leverage after I decided not to trade with Stops, figuring that doing so was just helping the exchange to rip me off. So this time I kept my short in place, knowing it would be triggered by the engineered rally. I indeed made a post on 'Wall Observer' Thread stating that I believed that this was all that the 'break out' would transpire to be. So when my stop loss got punted away up the Ask wall, despite their being literally hundreds of BTC in the wall between 600-608 just a millisecond beforehand, I wasn't all like "
Oh, Shock horror! How could this have possibly happened to me!?" I was more like, "
yep, typical Bitfinex". I was angry, but not surprised in the slightest.