Hacker News Reader

Comment by pizza234 | Hacker News Reader

How do they handle volatility? Is Walmart able to sell the coins immediately, or they (essentially) gamble?

I expect them to hire an intermediary company for handling the litecoin wallets, and converting it instantly into USD on walmarts bank accounts.

Pretty irrelevant. They could hire one trader to manage the inventory in real time and have effectively no market risk.

How so? I'm not going to look up the price of Litecoin so let's use Bitcoin. Say they received those coins on Sunday, Sept 5th. How is the trader managing the ~14% drop the next day?

Edit: Looked up the Litecoin price because it was bugging me - that same timeframe was a 22% drop which it has yet to recover from.

No, there's no market risk because the inventory is closed almost immediately. As the inventory comes in they hedge using liquid LTC futures which are available on a number of exchanges. Or they just sell the LTC spot straight away. Either way, it is a trivial task that one person can do manually after a few days of training.

Either they hire that one person themselves or outsource it.

So they would just automatically sell the coins, as pizza234 suggested. Seems like you don't want a human trader and instead want an automated process automatically selling, considering that Wal-Mart is global and operates 24/7.

Yeah, actually I misread their second sentence initially, but that's exactly what I imagine they would do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com