The market sell order, which presented as a large red wick spanning the $62,500 to $60,000 range, could be considered an example of a “scam wick."
Yesterday afternoon at exactly 6PM UTC, an unknown whale on Coinbase executed a large market sell order, temporarily sending the price of Bitcoin (BTC) tumbling to $60,000 in a flash crash.
The market sell order, which presented as a large red wick spanning the $62,500 to $60,000 range, could be considered an example of a “scam wick” — that is, a large market order designed to trigger a cascade of stop losses and shake out leveraged position holders.
Scam wicks can be used to instigate a change in momentum, sending the price tumbling or soaring as stop sell or buy orders (respectively) are triggered, adding further fuel to the candle.
Depending on the order book thickness, it usually takes at least a several million dollar market order to trigger such an avalanche of orders on major exchanges.
However, in this case, the sell order was met with heavy support at the $60,000 threshold and triggered an onslaught of limit buys — catapulting the price back up to $62,500 just minutes later, before seeing it break $63,000 just two hours later.
A Failed Attempt
In total, a whopping 246 BTC (worth ~$15 million) was liquidated in the space of a minute.
The event propagated to other major exchanges, including Binance and Kraken, which saw BTC collapse below $61,000 before recovering just as swiftly. Those with triggered limit buys are now in a healthy profit at Bitcoin’s current ~$61,600 value.
Given that the $60,000 threshold was viciously defended by the bulls, this paints it as a key area of support going forward.
We scam wick and then we pump
— TraderKoz (@TraderKoz) November 3, 2021
Adapt or die
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