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Bitcoin plunges 50% on Mt. Gox to hit USD230 as troubles continue

Bitcoin prices lost half their value to hit USD230 on the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox Exchange on Sunday, as traders shied away from the virtual currency amid ongoing concerns over withdrawal issues.

BTC/USD fell to a session low of USD220.30 on Mt. Gox, before trimming losses to trade at USD253.90 during U.S. morning hours, down 45.1%.

Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox was forced to halt all Bitcoin withdrawals on February 7 due to a technical issue, with the issue yet to be fully resolved.

Mt. Gox was once the world's largest Bitcoin trading exchange, with volume topping 1 million trades a day at its peak. It is now the third-largest Bitcoin exchange.

Meanwhile, sentiment remained jittery after Bitcoin marketplace Silk Road 2 was hacked over the weekend, with hackers stealing approximately 4,500 Bitcoin worth nearly USD2.7 million in the latest development to roil the virtual currency.

The hackers exploited the transaction malleability bug, the same bug that forced Mt. Gox to halt all withdrawals.

Elsewhere, the price of a Bitcoin last traded at USD631.95 on Slovenia-based BitStamp, while prices on BTC-e traded at USD596.20. BitStamp is the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, while Bulgaria-based BTC-e is the second-biggest.

BitStamp allowed redemptions to resume on Friday, three days after the exchange halted customer withdrawals to deal with cyber attacks against its platform.

According to the CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index, which averages prices from the major exchanges, prices of the crypto-currency dropped 5.2% to hit USD611.75.

Bitcoin is digital cash for the internet and it is not backed by a government or central bank to regulate or issue it. It can be used to purchase goods and services from stores and online retailers.

Prices of the virtual currency soared to an all-time high of USD1,241.10 on November 29. It was trading at USD100 in early October.

How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market: Now Revised & Updated for the 21st Century
by Nicolas Darvas and Steve Burns

How did a world-famous dancer with no knowledge of the stock market, or of finance in general, make 2 million dollars in the stock market in 18 months starting with only $10,000? Darvas is legendary, and with good reason. In this new edition: How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market: Now Revised & Updated for the 21st Century Steve Burns uses his experience to offer explanations as to why the methods are still reliable. Updating a classic book is a monumental task. The basic philosophy of the writer cannot be changed. Steve Burns approach this work with the eye of a master restorer who looks at a classical painting that is being refurbished. He carefully studied the text to bring Nicolas Darvas wisdom into the twenty-first century. Steve Burns illuminate the dramatic changes in the market to show how Nicolas Darvas principles are more useful now than ever.

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Darvas Box indicator in premium section of the forum.

The Complete Guide to Day Trading: A Practical Manual From a Professional Day Trading Coach
by Markus Heitkoetter

Do you want to be a day trader? Every day, millions of dollars change hands in the markets, presenting the perfect opportunity for people just like you to make significant money and profits through the art of day trading.
But here's the question: is day trading right for you? And, if it is, how do you get started?
In his new three-part guide, professional day trading coach Markus Heitkoetter lays out a simple, proven system for trading success. From the basic essentials of trading to the actual process of making money in the markets, he'll cover it all.

• What You Need To Get Started: The Tools, The Methods, The Mindset
  
• Finding the Best Market to Trade: Futures, Forex, Stocks, or Options
  
• A 7-Step Approach to Developing Your Own Profitable Trading Strategy
  
• The 10 Power Principles of Successful Trading Strategies
  
• Avoiding The 7 Common Mistakes of Traders
  
• Get Started Without Risking A Single Penny
  
• Ready-To-Use Trading Plan Templates, Checklists, Resource Directories, & More

Loaded with easy-to-use information, proven and reliable strategies and guidelines, and a practical hands-on approach to the industry, The Complete Guide to Day Trading is your own personal manual to success in the markets.

Theory Of Stochastic Processes : With Applications to Financial Mathematics and Risk Theory



This book is a collection of exercises covering all the main topics in the modern theory of stochastic processes and its applications, including finance, actuarial mathematics, queuing theory, and risk theory.

The aim of this book is to provide the reader with the theoretical and practical material necessary for deeper understanding of the main topics in the theory of stochastic processes and its related fields.

The book is divided into chapters according to the various topics. Each chapter contains problems, hints, solutions, as well as a self-contained theoretical part which gives all the necessary material for solving the problems. References to the literature are also given.

The exercises have various levels of complexity and vary from simple ones, useful for students studying basic notions and technique, to very advanced ones that reveal some important theoretical facts and constructions.

This book is one of the largest collections of problems in the theory of stochastic processes and its applications. The problems in this book can be useful for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as for specialists in the theory of stochastic processes.

Preliminary Announcement of the MetaTrader 5 Client Terminal build 900: Magazines in MetaTrader Market and New MetaViewer

Over the next week, we will release the MetaTrader 5 client terminal update. After the release of the update, we will publish an additional news containing the full list of changes and the build number. The following changes are planned:

1. Market: Added new product category in MetaTrader AppStore - Magazines. Now, users can buy not only trading applications but also trading and financial magazines quickly and easily.
   
   
   
   
   Just like MetaTrader 5 applications, magazines can be purchased at MQL5.community Market as well as directly via MetaTrader 5 terminal. All magazines are accompanied by detailed descriptions and screenshot galleries:
   
   
   
   
   
   The latest magazine issues are always displayed in the showcase, while the previous ones can be found on the Archive tab.
   
   To buy a magazine, you should have an MQL5.com account and the necessary amount of funds on it. The account data should be specified at the Community tab of the terminal settings:
   
   
   
   
   
   Click Buy on the magazine's page to purchase it. Purchase confirmation dialog appears:
   
   
   
   
   
   To continue, agree to the rules of using the Market service and enter your MQL5.community password. After that, the specified amount of funds will be withdrawn from your account and the magazine will be downloaded. Buy button will be replaced by Open one.
   
   Magazine files are downloaded to My Documents\MQL5 Market\Magazines\[Magazine name]\[Issue name]. The download may be performed in two formats:
   
   • MQB - this protected format is used for paid magazines. When purchasing and downloading a magazine file, it is encoded so that it can be opened only on the PC it has been downloaded to. Generation of an encoded copy is called activation. Each magazine can be activated at least 5 times on different hardware. Magazine sellers can increase the number of activations at their sole discretion.
   • PDF - this format is used for free magazines. After downloading, such file can be moved and viewed on other devices.
   
   The special component called MetaViewer has been added to MetaTrader 5 terminal allowing users to view MQB files. This application is launched when you click Open at the downloaded magazine page. If User Account Control system is enabled on the user's PC, the user will be prompted to allow the terminal to associate MQB files with MetaViewer during the first launch. After the association, MQB files are automatically opened in MetaViewer when launched from Windows file explorer.
   
   
   
   If you click ОК, the files are associated and the selected magazine issue is opened in MetaViewer immediately. If you click Cancel, only the magazine issue is opened.
   
   
   
   
   
   MetaViewer is a convenient application for viewing books and magazines in MQB and PDF formats. Keyboard arrows are used to turn over the pages: left and right arrows - for page-by-page navigation, while up and down arrows - for scrolling. MetaViewer menu and control panel contain additional commands for setting the journal's view and navigation:
   
   
   • File - commands for opening the files and exiting the program.
   • View - display settings: interface language, page look, enabling control panel and status bar, as well as page rotation.
   • Navigation - navigation commands: switching between the pages, moving to the first, last or selected page.
   • Zoom - page scale management commands: zooming in and out, fitting height, width and actual page size.
   • Help - information about the program and useful links.
   
   
2. Terminal: added MQL tab to EX5 file properties. The tab contains the program's icon as well as its name and description specified in the application's source code via the appropriate #property parameters.
   
   
   
   The tab appears only after MetaViewer is registered in the system. If a current user has sufficient rights and User Account Control system is disabled, MetaViewer is registered automatically during the terminal's first launch after the update. Otherwise, the user will see the dialog window requesting a one-time elevation of rights for MetaViewer during the first attempt to open a magazine.
   
   
   
3. Terminal: Added MQL5.community fast registration dialog in case a user has no account. Now, an MQL5.community account can be created without the need to leave the terminal.
   
   
   
   
   
   Specify login and email address in the registration window. After clicking Register, an email for MQL5.community account activation is sent to the specified address.
   
   MQL5.community account allows traders to use additional powerful services:
   
   • MetaTrader 5 AppStore - users can buy MetaTrader 5 apps or download them for free directly from the terminal. MetaTrader 5 AppStore offers hundreds of various applications and their number is constantly increasing.
   • Signals - users can subscribe to trading signals provided by professional traders and make profit. Trading operations are automatically copied from provider's account to subscriber's one. The service also allows selling your own trading signals. A trading account can be connected to the monitoring system in a few clicks.
   • Jobs - a freelance service allowing customers to securely order the development of MetaTrader 4 and 5 applications. The orders are executed by experienced programmers. The service also allows you to make profit by developing programs ordered by customers.
   
   
4. Terminal: Fixed the depth of market freezing when the best bid price is higher than the best ask one.
5. Terminal: Fixed setting the fill policy type for market trade requests depending on the trade symbol's execution type and allowed filling modes.
6. Terminal: Fixed display of incorrect SL and TP values in the position open dialog in case there is a position with placed SL and TP levels and the levels are placed "In Points". Incorrect SL and TP level values in points have previously been inserted to these fields. Beginning with the new build, the values in the above mentioned case are displayed in prices regardless of the level placing mode.
7. Terminal: Fixed occasional incomplete display of the trading history for the current day.
8. Terminal: Reduced memory consumption during MQL5 CodeBase and MQL5 Market operation.
9. Terminal: Fixed working with context menus when using touch screen devices powered by Microsoft Windows 8 or higher.
10. Market: Added product activation confirmation dialog displaying the number of remaining activations.
    
    
    
    Each application purchased in MetaTrader AppStore is additionally protected, so that it can be launched only on the PC it has been downloaded to during the purchase. Generation of an encoded copy is called activation. Each product can be activated at least 5 times on different hardware. Sellers can increase the number of activations at their sole discretion.
    
    The new dialog protects users from wasting activations by informing that their number is limited.
11. MQL5: Fixed crash when initializing primitive type arrays by a sequence.
12. MQL5: Fixed errors when working with #ifdef/#else/#endif conditional compilation macros.
13. MQL5: MQL5 language compiler moved to MetaEditor. The compiler will be available for download as a separate .exe file.
14. Signals: Added information about a signal, to which an account is subscribed, to the Navigator window:
    
    
    
    
    If the account is subscribed to the signal, the appropriate icon with the signal's name is shown for it. When hovering the mouse cursor over the name, the subscription's expiration date is displayed. The context menu contains commands for viewing the signal and unsubscribing from it. The latter one is displayed only if the appropriate trading account is currently active in the terminal.
    
    The subscription icon makes working with signals more convenient.
15. Signals: Added legend for equity, growth, balance and distribution graphs. Also, marks displaying funds depositing and withdrawal have been added to the equity graph. When hovering the mouse cursor over the balance operation triangle, a tooltip with the operation sum is displayed:
    
    
    
    
16. MetaEditor: Fixed the loss of focus in the code editing window that occurred after the first compilation.
17. MetaEditor: Fixed automatic scrolling of the compilation window to the first warning if there are no errors.
18. MetaEditor: Fixed highlighting predefined _DEBUG and _RELEASE macros in the source code.
19. MetaEditor: Fixed operation of snippets if the automatic entering of line indentations is disabled.
20. Fixed errors reported in crash logs.
21. Updated documentation.

The update will be available through the LiveUpdate system.

Gold Sees Slight Boost from Weaker U.S. Economic Data

Comex gold futures have pushed just above unchanged price levels on the day Tuesday, following some weaker-than-expected U.S. economic data released at mid-morning. The consumer confidence index and the Richmond Fed business survey both showed weaker-than-expected readings. And earlier-released U.S. housing index report also did not meet market expectations. That news pushed the U.S. dollar index lower and in turn helped to boost the gold market futures above the unchanged level. The recent spate of downbeat U.S. economic data is going to make it harder for the Federal Reserve to keep its "tapering" program in place. April gold was last trading up $2.00 at $1,340.00.

Major Bitcoin Exchange Is Insolvent, Companies Say

A major bitcoin exchange has gone bust after secretly racking up catastrophic losses, other virtual currency companies said Tuesday — a potentially fatal blow for the exotic new form of money.

The website of Tokyo-based Mt. Gox was returning a blank page Tuesday. The disappearance of the site follows the resignation Sunday of Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles from the board of the Bitcoin Foundation, a group seeking legitimacy for the currency, and a withdrawal ban imposed at the exchange earlier this month.

Prominent members of the Bitcoin community — including San Francisco-based wallet service Coinbase and Chinese exchange BTC China — sought to shore up confidence in the currency by saying Mt. Gox's collapse was an isolated case of mismanagement. They said it had abused users' trust, but did not offer details on how.

"As with any new industry, there are certain bad actors that need to be weeded out, and that is what we are seeing today," the statement said.

Documents purportedly leaked from the company lay out the scale of the problem. An 11-page "Crisis Strategy Draft" published on the blog of entrepreneur and Bitcoin enthusiast Ryan Selkis says that 740,000 bitcoins are missing from Mt. Gox , which roughly translates to hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of losses, although figures are fuzzy given Bitcoin's extreme volatility.

"At the risk of appearing hyperbolic, this could be the end of Bitcoin , at least for most of the public," the draft said.

In a post to his blog, Selkis said that the document was handed to him by a "reliable source" and that several people close to the company had confirmed the figures. Reached by phone, he declined further comment.

The scandal may cost Bitcoin enthusiasts dear.

At the Tokyo office tower housing Mt. Gox , bitcoin trader Kolin Burgess said he had picketed the building since Feb. 14 after flying in from London, hoping to get back $320,000 he has tied up in bitcoins with Mt. Gox .

"I may have lost all of my money," said Burgess, next to placards asking if Mt. Gox is bankrupt. "It hasn't shaken my trust in Bitcoin , but it has shaken my trust in bitcoin exchanges."

Mt. Gox CEO Karpeles did not immediately return several messages seeking comment. A security officer at the office tower said no one from Mt. Gox was in the building. Tibbane, an Internet company that Karpeles is CEO of, still has its name listed on the building's directory.

"I have no idea" where they are, said Burgess, the trader. "I'm both annoyed and worried."

On bitcoin exchanges, the currency's value has fallen to about $470 from $550 in the past few hours, a figure already down more than 50 percent on the price of $1,200 per bitcoin reached on Mt. Gox three months ago.

The disappearance of Mt. Gox could be fatal for Bitcoin , which was started in 2009 as a currency free from government controls. Bitcoin 's boosters say the currency's design make it impossible to counterfeit and difficult to manipulate, and the virtual money has won an eclectic mix of die-hard fans, including libertarians, tech enthusiasts and adventurous investors.

But the currency has struggled to shake off its associations with criminality, particularly its role in powering the now-defunct online drug marketplace Silk Road. Only last month another member of the Bitcoin Foundation, Vice Chairman Charlie Shrem, was arrested at New York's Kennedy Airport on charges of money laundering.

Authorities have been taking an increasingly hard look at Bitcoin and related virtual currencies including Litecoin, Namecoin, Ripple, and countless others. Some countries, including Russia, have effectively banned the currency. In other jurisdictions, authorities are weighing whether to try to tame the marketplace through licenses or other mechanisms.

Even if Mt. Gox doesn't drag Bitcoin down with it, there's fear that the exchange's demise will push officials to take an even more skeptical stance.

"I think this is disastrous from a (regulatory) standpoint," Selkis, the enthusiast, said in a message posted to Twitter. "The hammer will now come down hard."

Satter reported from London. Associated Press writer Stephen Wright in Bangkok also contributed to this report.

Trading for a Living: Psychology, Trading Tactics, Money Management
by Alexander Elder

Trading for a Living Successful trading is based on three M's: Mind, Method, and Money. Trading for a Living helps you master all of those three areas:

• How to become a cool, calm, and collected trader
• How to profit from reading the behavior of the market crowd
• How to use a computer to find good trades
• How to develop a powerful trading system
• How to find the trades with the best odds of success
• How to find entry and exit points, set stops, and take profits

Trading for a Living helps you discipline your Mind, shows you the Methods for trading the markets, and shows you how to manage Money in your trading accounts so that no string of losses can kick you out of the game. To help you profit even more from the ideas in Trading for a Living, look for the companion volume--Study Guide for Trading for a Living. It asks over 200 multiple-choice questions, with answers and 11 rating scales for sharpening your trading skills. For example: Question Markets rise when

• there are more buyers than sellers
• buyers are more aggressive than sellers
• sellers are afraid and demand a premium
• more shares or contracts are bought than sold

Every change in price reflects what happens in the battle between bulls and bears. Markets rise when bulls feel more strongly than bears. They rally when buyers are confident and sellers demand a premium for participating in the game that is going against them. There is a buyer and a seller behind every transaction. The number of stocks or futures bought and sold is equal by definition.

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Interview with Dr. Alexander Elder: "I want to be a psychiatrist in the market"

MQL5 Cookbook: Developing a Framework for a Trading System Based on the Triple Screen Strategy

Forex probes set to dwarf Libor cases

The global probe into possible price rigging in foreign exchange markets has spawned a new industry centred on investigating the £5.3tn a day sector as regulators and global banks throw enormous resources at shedding light on the allegations.

At least a dozen authorities across the US, Europe and Asia are assisting in or conducting investigation against more than 15 banks to find evidence that traders have shared information about client orders and tried to move crucial forex benchmarks.

The myriad probes into the largest financial market in the world is expected trigger multibillion-dollar bills for fines and civil litigation and has prompted banks as well as regulators to put a vast number of internal and external staff on the case.

Lawyers and bankers say the initiative is likely to rank among the biggest cross-border regulatory efforts ever and could surpass the sprawling probe into the manipulation of Libor and other interbank lending rates.

“The mountain is much bigger than in the Libor cases,” one senior compliance banker warned.

In a boost to an industry of lawyers, consultancy and data mining firms, some bankers and analysts estimate the resources used is adding up to far more than 1,000 people.

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority alone, which is attempting to play the lead in the global efforts, has in its enforcement division tasked at least 50 people, including external and temporary workers, with the probe.

On the industry side, the top 10 banks in forex, including Deutsche Bank, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland, have assigned far more than 500 people combined to work on the case in their internal probes, according to estimates from several people involved.

Analysts estimate that those three bank, as well as Barclays and HSBC will together have to set aside €8.5bn-€10.6bn for litigation costs including fines and penalties in 2014 and 2015, on top of the €16.4bn those five banks had already provisioned for legal costs through the end of 2013.

The probe also took a new turn last week when it emerged that officials at the Bank of England, which is assisting the FCA, were told of concerns about forex manipulation as early as 2006.

The forex effort includes regulators and prosecutors from the US to Switzerland and Hong Kong. To cope, the FCA has set up a special team to co-ordinate with other agencies.

“The investigations have prompted unprecedented global co-operation,” Matthew Nunan, head of wholesale enforcement at the FCA, told the Financial Times. “There is a high level of mutual respect and understanding between the authorities. The FCA is playing a key role in driving this forward.”

After what lawyers have described as bickering during the Libor probe, regulators seem keen to avoid such mistakes with forex. They are seeking to reduce the number of overlapping information requests being fired at firms by various agencies.

Often regulators are combing over the same material, but with different goals and legal rule books. Financial regulators are investigating misconduct and market abuse at individual banks while antitrust regulators are looking for attempted collusion between them.

Taking a page from US practice, the FCA is leaning on the banks to perform and pay for much of the investigative legwork. As one lawyer put it, “the FCA has learnt that it is more effective to get the banks to do their work for them”.

Analysts and bankers estimate that the banks are spending as much as several hundred million dollars combined on the internal probes to fund an army of lawyers, consultants, data mining and forensic specialists who help their internal legal, risk and compliance staff.

Many big UK and US law firms have specialists on the case and the big four accountancy firms have units focusing on financial risk and forensic investigations. KPMG last year created a separate Trading Risk Solutions Group led by a former trader and focused specifically on rate manipulation, rogue trading and trader fraud.

The external firms are charged with sifting through chatroom conversations, instant messages, phone conversations, voice mails as well as email and text messages. Then they seek to match the communication with actual market data to determine whether there was manipulation, a complicated task given the vast array of transactions executed every day.

The amount of data is enormous, so the banks hire third-party groups that specialise in forensic data mining. UBS estimates that its staff alone send 12m emails each day. “We have hundreds of millions of messages to trawl through,” said an executive at another bank involved in the investigation.

Phil Beckett, managing director at one of the specialist firms, Proven Legal Technologies, said: “The volume of data is incredible so you have to use behavioural science . . . What you are looking at is key dates, key people, key events.”

The analysts also have to struggle to decipher the slang used by traders. In forex, the communication is proving trickier to decode than the more obvious and blunt attempts at manipulation seen in the Libor scandal, lawyers say.

“We try to figure out what the mindset and language of the specific traders is, their key phraseology,” Mr Beckett says. “You still sometimes have the eureka moment of getting a smoking gun document but a lot of it is trying to pull out tiny bits of information and trying to piece them together to get a full picture.”

The scale of the effort was foreshadowed by the Libor case, which has been going on for several years. In that scandal, one large bank’s internal probe retrieved 100m documents and reviewed 18m of them using 1,000 different search terms, according to a banker involved in the efforts. The bank conducted nearly 200 interviews and used 150 people including third-party vendors.

As a result, the probes may stretch well beyond the 2015 timeframe that Martin Wheatley, head of the FCA, has given, making sure that the armies of lawyers, consultants and computer specialists will continue to be inundated with work.

“I think even 2016 is optimistic,” says the compliance banker says.

The Best Books: The Top 100 Novels of All Time

A contemporary list, with an international flavour and a respect for the classics, The Best Books: Top 100 Novels of All Time list contains many of the great works of fiction you'd expect, but with a few surprises to add a little spice to the collection.

Which books would you omit and which would you add to our list? Please let us know in the comments section below.