Has anyone noticed all this automated bot activity lately?  5 rapid fire trades at a time, both up and down, 1 BTC - 0.01 BTC at a time.  Meanwhile large orders on the buy and sell side repeatedly appear and disappear within seconds, always at the same location and for roughly the same amounts.

Someone needs to tweak their bots.

Snapshot: http://imgur.com/sa11LVq

What's interesting to me is that even though the log will show 5 trades, the order book will only show 1 of them actually making a deduction to the leading order at the time.  So while it looks like 5 btc is being sold at a time, its only 1 btc.

The only way I figure they're doing this is to add 4 BTC to the bid order at precisely the same time that they add to the sell order, thus it "looks' like more volume is getting pumped through.  Someone must be paying through the nose in trading fees to do this.

Funny thing is, no one wants fiat in MtGox...so after we're all done riding wave I wonder when the reality check will start to set in?

I simply cannot imagine that all these sellers will be comfortable with their fiat sitting in MtGox.  Doesn't matter where the bottom is, the deeper it gets the bigger the snap back will be.

I believe this is essentially correct.  A big part of me wonders why a whale would suddenly want to sell so much on Gox.  Either they're comfortable sitting with the site long term, or they got an inside deal on the withdrawal track, or they just got antsy with 3 days of plateau.   The reality is, many people are still sitting in Gox while it acts out (what could potentially be) a swan song. Over time, I doubt many traders will be comfortable with sitting in fiat there.  

TL;DR - as long as the fiat withdrawal situation is unresolved, there will be tremendous bitcoin buy pressure born of frustration.  The real danger is when it bubbles over a price point where people think it can't be comfortably sustained.

Good insight, to me this just says that Gox is still unfortunately the price setter in terms of total market momentum.  If there's a knee-jerk swing on MtGox, the other exchanges are sure to follow.  Since Bitstamp is the primary access point to withdraw funds however, it should be perpetually lower in price as the sellers flock here.  The real marker for me will be when bitstamp price starts to edge up on the MtGox price.  This won't happen overnight, but it means that the sell pressure is no longer significant, and the bid pressure from buyers willingly making fiat transfers into bitstamp will be strong enough to bump the price on its own.

For anyone that missed the brief appearance of an enormous bid wall today.  

The whole affair seemed to be a buyer acting out of desperation.  He saw the price rise 5 dollars in 3 hours, and worried that he was losing an opportunity to get cheap BTC decided to pull the trigger on a 5k BTC buy.

This immediately consumed asks until the price shot up to $137.48.  For a very brief time after, this same buyer (or someone else) showed their hand by displaying a 3k bid wall at $135 before quickly contracting it.  So there is some more latent buy pressure hidden right now.

I'm not ruling out the possibility of a glitch at this point, but the order movement is interesting to watch.  It would be nice to have a twitter update or SOMETHING from Gox but as usual they are mum.  If users are intermittently getting it it makes sense that they are setting up massive bids to catch a potential crash, and slightly less BTC to catch bumps.