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profghibli
Aug 23, 2018 11:45 PM

BTCUSD Shorts at ATH, Longs/Shorts ratio at all time low 

Bitcoin / DollarBitfinex

Description

This is BitFinex shorts/longs total amount in BTC at the bottom
Shorts at an all time high, shorts to longs ratio is at an all time high as well, by far.
Maybe just a bit of spook is needed to make the shorters shit their pants I think.
But I think this weak news (the rejected ETFs to be reviewed) are not enough to spook bears. Really, a decent price pump, THEN followed by bull news might start the short squeeze.

Too early to call entries/stops/exits.

A possible way to play this would be to get into a small but long-term position when the price exits this range of 6900 - 6200, going long if the price breaks 7000 and short of price breaks 6200. BUT I really don't like that setup. I will stay on the sideline for now.

Comment

In hindsight would have been a great long trade. Now the shorts value has dropped by a lot and is actually slightly below longs value now.

Comment

Lesson to learn here - be bold when such rare opportunities present themselves.
Comments
Snow0110
Thanks for your advice its much appreciated, been thinking the same to sit by the sidelines for now.
BitcoinBearSlayer
How many whole bit-coins does a short contract represent? How many short contracts are open? Does the number of bit-coin shorted exceed the number of bit-coin in existence? When you short gold, silver, oil, etc. there is always more coming to market. There is only a fixed number of bit-coin that will ever exist. How do they square that fact with reality?
profghibli
@Kwa, on BitFinex it's not called "contracts" like on BitMEX for example. Here, the number represents total borrow + sold bitcoins. (So 38904 shorter bitcoins, 26550 longed bitcoins). I.E. Short contract if you wish to call it that way represents a whole bitcoin. On BitMEX however, a short/long contract usually is quoted as $1 worth of BTC. I do not have access to the total number of shorts + longs on BitMEX however.
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