This is not a joke. Someone actually bought ETH today at a mere 300 INR per piece. The current market price is hovering around 66000 INR. That’s a hefty discount. This is not a promotion. This was a mistake by a seller. The mistake of “Market” Orders and this is becoming quite frequent.
Before we get into why and how this happened we need to understand what are Market and Limit Orders.
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What are Market and Limit Orders?
Market orders are transactions meant to execute as quickly as possible at the present or market price. Conversely, a limit order sets the maximum or minimum price at which you are willing to buy or sell.
One thing people often make the mistake of understanding is that “Market Price” may not always be equal to the price you sell or buy at if you place a Market Order.
The market price is the last traded price of the asset, in this case a cryptocurrency. The market order would mean they will execute all the orders in the order-book till your order is fulfilled.
Let us say there are 5 Buy orders in the order-book
- Buy 15 Tokens @100/token
- Buy 10 Tokens @90/token
- Buy 3 Tokens @ 70/token
- Buy 10 Tokens @60/token
- Buy 20 Tokens @50/Token
When a seller places a Market Order to sell 30 Tokens, here’s how they will be sold.
15 Tokens will be sold at 100/Token = 1500
10 Tokens will be sold at 90/Token = 900
3 Tokens will be sold at 70/ Token = 210
2 Tokens will be sold at 60/Token = 120
Total 30 Tokens sold for 2730 at average price of 91/Token.
On the other hand, seller can place a Limit-Order for 30 Tokens at a price of 100/Token, it will only be fulfilled when Buyers will buy the tokens for 100/Token price.
Why do People place Market Orders?
Simply for speed. Market orders are execute immediately as it does not depend on price of the asset. Market orders are placed when traders are in need for quick liquidity or assets, sometimes in volatile markets.
You have 500k INR, you want to buy a token with price around 30/token, you can place a market buy order for 500k. It would mean “Buy whatever you can for 500k INR, don’t worry about the price”.
So how did someone buy ETH today at Just INR 300?
This is not the first time I have noticed this. There have been times when some have been lucky enough to buy ETH at 100 INR or even sell ETH at 1 Crore INR price. Some people call these troll orders.
A troll order is when you place a buy or sell order having a highly improbable value just for fun. Like 1 ETH = 300 INR. That is 0.0045 times the current market value of 66000. You know it is not possible, unless someone makes a mistake.
Someone must have placed such troll orders on Coindelta.
4.7396 ETH @ 300 INR/ETH
1 ETH @ 350 INR/ETH
and so on.
And unfortunately today a seller placed a huge “Market” type sell order. I am going by the assumption from the volumes that the seller sold close to 150 ETH at market price. The trade engine sold ETH at the price of the open Buy orders until it sold off all 150 ETH. Fortunately for the Buyers, they got cheap ETH. Very Cheap.
Can we actually get this lucky?
Well it depends. The last time someone sold a huge quantity of ETH on Market order, the prices went as low as 100. This time it is 300. We don’t know what can happen now. 150 ETH is a huge volume to sell in one go, only a handful of traders have that kind of holdings. So I don’t think this will happen soon, but no harm in placing your own troll order, right?
How to avoid such a mistake?
When you are placing a market order, you should be vigilant about the prices. As far as Coindelta goes, they do show a warning before you place the order if the value has a difference of over 20% . So Read the warning.
Be careful with trading in cryptocurrency, you can get lucky or unlucky anytime if you are not vigilant.
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