Could not reopen Bitcoin short position on 30th July 2017 at $2635

[Guest cybery]

Hi IG,

 

I could not reopen 5 Bitcoin short position on 30th July 2017, 8pm Sydney time, at $2635.

 

I planed to close my short positions on Saturday(29th July) and reopen it on Sunday to avoid the risk of holding the position when the market is open while your platform is closed.

 

 

However today (30th Sunday) I could not reopen my short position:

"SORRY you can only place an order to close on this market. for further detail please call our helpdesk"

 

I also closed 0.5 short position today at $2632, wanted to open it when the price go up about  $10.

If you have given me any warning on "cannot open position", I won't close it at all.

 

I tried called helpdesk a few times but no one answered the call at all.

 

Please resolve this issue as soon as possible.

 

Thanks.

[Guest cybery]

I want to reopen the short position now at 2654 but could not.

I am expecting Bitcoin price fall hard very soon, but still could not reopen short position

If IG have told me could not reopen short position, I would have not closed short them on Saturday at all ( and would have opened long position to lock P/L on Saturday morning instead). and today would have not closed my 0.5 short position and leaved it open 

[Guest Walker6577]

I am having the exact same issue. I tried opening a short position this morning but it wouldn't let me and displayed a message of "You can only place an order to close on this market. For further details please call our helpdesk" Which I then did but i got no response. Please fix this issue IG.

 

EDIT: Dear Mr. Walker

We’re expecting increased volatility in bitcoin over the coming weeks, so we wanted to make sure you’re aware of the situation.

What’s the cause of this volatility?

As the bitcoin market has grown over the last few years, the network has struggled to keep up with the volume of payments. This is because each block of transactions is capped at 1MB. There has been widespread debate over how to increase this size, and two competing bitcoin improvement proposals (BIPs) have emerged. 

The proposal which has the majority of support, SegWit, allows for a ‘soft’ fork in the blockchain (a decentralised ledger which records all bitcoin transactions) which should cause minimal disruption. However there is also a minority proposal, Bitcoin Cash, which would result in a ‘hard’ fork and the creation of a second blockchain and currency unit. 

The bitcoin blockchain is going to be upgraded with these new protocols on 1 August. It is difficult to tell how much support the new blockchain will have initially, but we expect there could be significant volatility during this period. 

What does this mean for your positions?

Please ensure you are comfortable with the size of any bitcoin positions you hold, and that you have sufficient available funds to cover them in the event of high volatility. We may suspend trading on bitcoin temporarily if we do not have reliable prices from the underlying market.

More information about blockchain forks 

We base the price of our bitcoin and other contracts on the underlying market, made available to us by the exchanges and market-makers with which we trade. 

When the software of different miners becomes misaligned, a split, or ‘fork’, in the blockchain may occur, resulting in the existence of two different blockchains. 

In the past, cryptocurrency users have quickly agreed which version to accept as valid and continue to use, causing minimal disruption. In these instances, the old version of the blockchain has then been discontinued. 

In the event that one version isn’t discontinued – known as a hard fork – we will generally follow the blockchain that has the majority consensus of cryptocurrency users, and will therefore use this as the basis for our bitcoin and ether contracts. We reserve the right to determine which blockchain and cryptocurrency unit has the majority consensus behind them. If the hard fork results in a viable second cryptocurrency becoming tradeable on exchanges we have access to, then in our absolute discretion, we may create an equivalent position or cash adjustment on client accounts to reflect its value. However, we have no obligation to do this.

We're here to help

If you have any questions about this or need help with your account, our highly trained customer service team is here to assist you 24 hours a day from 8am on Sunday until 10pm on Friday, and 9am to 5pm on Saturdays.

[Guest luigo]

I'm having exactly the same problem. I trade through the API and my system had all its trade attempts rejected yesterday.

Let's see then what happens tomorrow then, as per the above explanation...