Meanwhile, at Mt Gox

[vacuum]

http://i.imgur.com/ANR4DUG.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/WZHJIjD.png

edit: mods, could you move this to virtual currencies subforum

[Neuro]

Those are some weird graphs to wrap your head around... Surrealists have taken over Mt Gox?

[vacuum]

Those are some weird graphs to wrap your head around... Surrealists have taken over Mt Gox?

They're market depth charts. The cumulative buy orders are the white/tan line on the left, the cumulative sell orders are the blue line on the right. Where the two lines come together indicates the current price. The distance between them is the bid vs ask, in other words, the spread. The green line shows how it's changed over time.

I believe the bars on the left indicate recent buy and sell orders. The vertical axis is how many coins the buy or sell order is for, and the horizontal axis indicates what price. The color indicates whether it's a buy or sell. I might be wrong about these bars though.

You can see from the two graphs that over a time period of 6.5 hrs, the market depth is fluctuating wildly. Normally in stable, liquid, markets, the buy and sell curves form a nice symmetrical V at a pretty good angle such as 30 or 45 degrees.

In the top graph, the price was origin about $145, and somebody put in a massive sell order of about 5000 BTC or $500,000. This consumed all bid orders all the way down to $121. Due to the lag of 60 seconds or so, buyers were not able to increase their bids to make up for the sudden drop, and that's why there is a spread of $25 in that graph.

Note the walls of resistance. In the top chart, there's a good wall of resistance at $120. If that wall is broken, the price will slide to $115 pretty quickly because it's not a very steep curve until the next wall at $115.