Not terribly long following last week’s announcement that Chinese bitcoin exchange OKCoin would be offering peer-to-peer lending services and marginal trading comes yet another announcement.
The Beijing company on Monday announced that they have added algorithmic trading tools on their popular trading platform — making them the self-proclaimed first bitcoin exchange to offer these sorts of institutional trading tools to investors using their service.
The exchange has started rolling out the following strategies to users of their platform:
- Trigger orders: Allows the investor to make specifications under what conditions an order will be added to the OKCoin trading book.
- Icebergs: Allows an investor to place a large volume order without disturbing the market by breaking up that order into many smaller orders — effectively hiding the order quantity.
- Modified Time-Weighted Average Price: Allows an investor who trades high volumes to execute orders over a period of time in attempts “to keep the price close to the prevailing market price”
Quite interestingly, the launch of these tools are the product of Changpeng Zhao, who recently joined the company from his former Head of Development role at Blockchain.info. He serves as OKCoin’s Chief Technology Officer today.
“By being the the first Bitcoin exchange in the world to offer Wall Street level trading tools to sophisticated investors, OKCoin is not only raising the bar – we are leading the digital currency evolution,” said Zhao in a statement. “I am excited that I can leverage my Wall Street experience directly at OKCoin, and I see many opportunities for the company to fill gaps and shortfalls within the Bitcoin trading ecosystem.”
OKCoin CEO Star Xu chimed in by adding:
“By bringing professional trading technologies from the traditional financial world, OKCoin hopes to boost the growth and maturity of Bitcoin trading. Bitcoin trading is still in its infancy, historically-speaking, but many of the investors involved are quite sophisticated. We have seen a lot of increased interest from knowledgeable individuals, investment funds, and institutional investors. These investors are looking for an exchange that can provide the types of professional trading technologies that the traditional securities world takes for granted. OKCoin is committed to the continued enhancement of our trading tools and service offerings, and we will not stop until our platform offers all of the same trading services and options that one might expect from world-leading financial exchanges.”
OKCoin is China’s largest bitcoin exchange volume, funding, users, and page views. Future plans include expanding their trading services outside of Chinese borders, though a timeline hasn’t been made public.
earonesty 
Bleh. They need to allow shorts (lend/sell) and options. I worked on wall st developing markets. The first reputable exchange to develop a true short and options market will do very well for themselves. Selling covered calls will help stabilize long-term investments and prevent whipsaw speculation.