Did the Lindex crashed last night? Dropped to 200l$ !

On the market history page the l$ felled down to 200L$ !!

From the status page:
We are temporarily halting Linden Dollar (L$) purchases for maintenance and review purposes. Please monitor this post for updates and further information.

The Lindex page isn't available now, although it was not many minutes ago. I wondered what was going on because all the sales between 261 and 252 had gone. Lindens offered for sale went straight down from 262 to 251.

Maybe they are preventing people from requesting cheques, which are due to end on the 31st I got my request in yesterday though.

I saw that too when i went to bed last night and entered an amount of l$ for 250.
And it has been sold at that price 6 minutes after I placed the order

Curses! I also saw it before I went to bed last night but I didn't put any up for sale

I did notice something odd in the last few days though. I've been selling at 262 and the last two times I sold (24th and 26th), the sales were completed in just a few minutes even though there were many millions for sale at that price.

Heh. Probably LindeX has been in need of "maintenance" for a while, then. Hard to imagine there could have been that much turnover that demand ate those millions and more millions replaced them, all in minutes.

Although that would be a cool incentive for Premium memberships: two different LindeX queues, where all Premium offers (and bids) would be filled before Basics. (Although maybe 99% of LindeX traders are Premium anyway?)

Think of the poor bastards who bought at market at the L$200 rate. Makes the game 20% more expensive than it already is, which must be a real burden for folks--especially in currencies that have tanked against the US$.

Yes, it has been acting strangely lately. First the spread reduced from 11 to 10. Now this sudden rise in value.

I also noticed that orders backed up on the buy side, while I could sell them very quickly. That would be the opposite effect if people were cashing out because of the no more check policy.

Sadly I missed the boat on selling at a very good price.

That's not a bad idea. You could IM whichever Linden it is who was asking for ideas concerning Premium benefits.

That's a sad thought, but it makes me feel better about missing the opportunity

Come to think of it, the teens of millions at 261 were almost gone on the 25th while there were still teens of millions at 262 (maybe over 20 million). I'd wondered if people had cancelled those orders and changed them to 262, but it wouldn't have made sense for them to do it simultaneously - unless they were all wanting to order cheques before the end of the month but, even then, it was bit too simultaneous.

I wonder if the lindex circuit breakers kicked in?

It looks like the demand for Lindens went through the roof on Christmas Day.

I was watching the lindex very closely last night, and participating in the mad trading. Thanks to whatever angels watch over me, I ended the night all on the cash side and no trades active.

There seemed to be a "fake" order quantity on sell @ 262 of around 14 million. My theory is linden labs added that amount to the real resident orders as part of the regular Lindex rate stabilization. That is separate from the real L$ sales they do via Supply Linden.

Someone was asleep at the switch, or away for the holidays, and the real orders at 261 and below were simply eaten up. I watched it happen last night, and got some sells done at 252, 248, and 246 which were completed in a few minutes, despite the trading page showing 14 million @ 262. I was able to trade with spreads of 14-18 points last night, and made a few bucks, but it was obvious the Lindex was headed for the circuit breakers which are supposed to kick in when the price changes too much. That's exactly what happened around 1am.

I assume right about now the LL staff who run the Lindex are being dragged out of bed / recalled from holiday, and they are talking over what to do. I also assume they will do something relatively quickly, since so much of the game economy depends on the Lindex functioning. My guess is they will dump a lot of L$ at whatever new price they want to stabilize at.

The Lindex page is accessible again. 25 million for sale at 262, and the next line is a small amount at 253. It doesn't look much different to when there were many millions at 262 and yet the lower offers were going through quickly.

Looks like the fake orders @ 262 have been upped to 25 million. The average trade for the day is 256.5, which is *below* the big chunk at 262, so its obvious those are not real orders being traded.

Im gonna play around with some small trades, to see what happens, but as crazy as its being, and the odds of another closing, It would be smart to keep most of your money on the cash side right now.

As has been said said all the buys at 262 were being skipped and instead sells were matching against 261. There's nowhere near enough orders at 261 to support any kind of trading so the whole market was quickly blown away down to 200 or something crazy. Check here: http://ninjaland.net/tools/lindex-market-data/ you can clearly see the 14 million at 262 remain untouched while 261 went from 33 million down to 0. Once 261 was exhausted there was no support at all. It looks almost like this started on the 21st even.

It's a pretty fragile point for the LindeX right now. If normal trade eats away the 30 million at 262 right now we'll see another crazy panicky swing.

This needs to be sorted quickly, buyers aren't going to be best pleased at this.

The last trade was at 251, and Im watching the orders at 251 drop, so its obvious the 25 million sitting @ 262 are not real orders. There might be a few people who placed some sells @262 thinking thats the current "best" rate, but its not significant. I will bet (with real money on trades Im doing right now) that 251 is the current "real" sell price.

My definition of "real" is the price at which people are willing to sell and wait more than a few minutes to complete. There's always a few people who place orders at a higher L$ number to get a more or less instant sell, but I'm talking about "standing orders" where people are expecting to take a while to complete.

My guess is we will blow through 251 and hit another trading stop sometime today. Its also my guess that someone higher up the LL food chain needs to approve placing "real" sell orders (like Zee Linden), and that just has not happened yet. If we see a lot more orders placed around 262, or the big block shift to a new price, then I would think that the approval was made.

Linden labs is fighting market forces. For whatever reason, nobody wants to place sells right now, at almost any price. Whether its cause they are away on holiday, or its year end, or its got something to do with the price increase on homestead islands about to hit, I don't know. But the sell orders are just not there.

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Update: The sells @ 262 just changed to 19,100,000, a suspiciously round number.

The Status blog is still saying that L$ purchases are halted, but people are buying.

I said I wasn't going to sell because of what Qie pointed out, but I did a test at 251 and they sold in just a few minutes.

The 25 million is now down to 19 million - hand tweaked maybe, to make it look as though that's the 'rate' and hope that people will sell at that rate or near it.

LindeX page is slowing down badly. Tried to put a L$100,000 market buy order in to see what happened and got this: We are unable to complete your request. • An error was encountered. [__LINE__] • Couldn't reserve order. • The system encountered an error while processing your order, please try again.

Now I can't get the Lindex Sell page at all.

[added]
Now I can.

It's beginning to look as though things are getting back to normal. Did your sells go through, DanielRavenNest?

I have one at 252 that's sitting there. It looks like they got approval to do real sells, and are dumping a bunch @262. It will be interesting to see if they blow through the Supply Linden daily limit (160,000 x 262 = 41,920,000L$). At that point they will either (1) stop adding real sell orders, and let the market do what it wants to anyway, or (2) violate their self imposed limit on daily Supply Linden transactions. I will let this order sit there today and see what happens, on the chance it will complete, and I get to make a nice profit on the trade (I bought at 270).

Since there is a lot of buy orders sitting around, and very few sells, simple economics says the price of L$ needs to rise to get more people to be willing to sell and balance the market. A higher price means a lower number of L$ per US dollar.

But the Lindex is not a free market. LL can create L$ at will, and undercut real players's trades by offering a lower price. The end result will be "inflation" via expanding the money supply, forcing the the value of the L$ to be where *they* want it to be, rather than where the customers would send it without interference.

I suppose stability in L$ rates is a good thing, it allows businesses to set prices and have a reasonable idea what they will get when they cash out. But I also think LL should be transparent about what they are doing in the market. Posting fake orders is in effect lying to your customers.

It looks to me like there are people selling at 262 and other amounts, and I'm wondering what will happen when the 262 pot gets down to the 25 million level - or maybe that 19 million level.

What makes you think this is a matter of them "posting fake orders" instead of it being a bug in the software? Is there any other evidence of them posting fake orders?

I do not "play" the lindenx. I just use it to cash out when needed. I am curious though.

It looks like one can buy as high as 290ish and potentially turn around and list to sell in the 250s(maybe).

I understand the volume would have to be high to make reasonable money, but are there people actively trading like this? How much of the exchanges volume is traders like this verses businesses cashing out to pay tier or to bank profits?