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I guess it all depends on the intentions of the trade leaders. If they are aware of the C2 limit-price fill algorithm and knowing take advantage of it to build an unrealistic trading history then I am not sure you can call such behavior anything other than gaming or cheating, although to be fair, they are just playing by the rules of the game that C2 has provided, e.g. they are not hacking the system.
If they are not aware that this is happening and just think they are great traders then of course no one could label them as such. Of course they must be in for a rude awakening the first time someone auto-trades their system and all of a sudden reality sets in.
I think assuming all of them are innocent of purposely gaming the system is probably naive.
Go back to any scalp strategy c2 ever had in the past 5 years. Strategy makes gain, all c2 Autotrader losing money on every trade. Is the exact scenario of what David described. Mkt price on the buy, mkt price on the sell. Paying backwards on bid/ask. But c2 will give the developer the better entry and exit because the order was enter into the system as limit if touched.
Matt said this is not “gaming” the system. I told him then I don’t know what is. Developer showing 200% return in a month, but all the subscribers are -15% for the month. But subscriber has real money on the line, developer is playing with paper money. We did agree that the system is fine once the developer gain first subscriber. But I don’t understand why we can’t “improve” it before it gets his first subscriber? A more realistic possibility, because no one in the real world someone is going to buy your 1000 weekly contract of 50 vix call at 0.05 when vix is at 12. But it does happen in c2.
Well, if the law has a loophole, it doesn’t mean that someone is using a loophole, it is breaking law or it is a cheater. My point is to modify the law without calling names.
I think this is the point everyone is trying to make. At the time there was an actual TRADE at 14.55, the ASK was still 14.60. So 14.60 should have been used as the fill price for this trade on C2.
Glad to see a serious discussion going on about this. Using the posts and the likes in this thread as an unofficial poll, it seems that most people here are in agreement that once a strategy has autotraders or TOS the system is pretty good at reflecting reality. Most people including me just want to see more conservatism added to the system for strategies that do not have actual fills to use for the calculations.
If there are no actual autotrader or TOS fills with real money the system should be as conservative as possible and fill all buys at the current ask price and all sells at the bid regardless if it was a limit order or market order that triggered the transaction. Obviously this is more conservative than what will happen in reality but when you design a bridge to carry 100 tons maximum you still design it for 200 tons instead. I think it would be preferable to have systems show a more conservative track record and then improve once autotraders come in rather than degrade after the first autotrader.
Certainly some developers will complain that it is overly conservative, but I think the number of developers complaining about it will be smaller in number than the people that would appreciate it. Also, if any developer doesn’t like it, they can set up TOS or get just one autotrader to then have the more accurate treatment of showing actual fills.
No matter what trade leader does, in real account, trading this VIX futures
would leave subscriber with loss, while trade leader has profit shown.
And that is at least 50 $ loss per contract.
That is main problem for most people here. Since they know it is not
possible to have even close results to those of trade leader.
This is kind of trading penny stocks, and always ending on wrong side of
slippage, liquidity. While ones who are first in take profits.
As I seemed to have opened pandora’s box with this thread, I figured I should chime in with a personal scalping experience at C2 to highlight the issue.
I tried my forex scalping system here 2 years ago. Would go for anywhere from 3 to 7-8 pips daily on a number of currency pairs. The first 2 months or so of the program I was getting better fills on C2 than on FXCM or IB, without any subscribers. I was shocked and thrilled. I had no ‘scamming’ ideas, I was seriously trying to run my system here.
The second I got a single subscriber the fills were as bad or worse than I was getting, several pips away. And when you are only going for several pips, that basically blows up the whole system.
Now I agree with Matthew in that alot of developers here aren’t trying to scam. They just don’t realize (as I didn’t) that C2 is very generous with the whole “trade when touch” thing.
Now that we all realize this, my thoughts on the solution as many listed above is two-fold:
1- A simple note or mark or different color on the graph showing where the system was live with real money.
2- Limit orders with no real money following them are converted to market orders the second the limit is touched.
This would provide honest, transparent analysis of any system, and prevent ‘scalping scammers’ as I call some of these folks (but not all).
p.s. sidenote - I hope C2 at least survives until later this year. Would like to put my swing forex strategy on it after its current demo period.
OSUTAI - you are factually inaccurate when you write:
Strategy makes gain, all c2 Autotrader losing money on every trade.
I have explained many times that, when there are AutoTraders, C2 uses the actual prices received by these traders in real-life broker accounts as the basis for the hypothetical fill prices shown in the track record.
There are many issues being discussed here – including how to handle cases without any AutoTraders – but for this small single issue, I am going to insist that people do not post factually inaccurate statements such as the one your made. It is not true to state that there are strategies where AutoTraders lose money while C2 shows profitable results. Period. Full stop.
By fixing many small single issues the company will end up fixing one annoying issue named Quality.
C2 is not annoyed or ashamed to but display incorrect information about dividends and TOS statistics (I see this these wrong informations/statistics every day and I’m annoyed by it). But C2 is annoyed if someone writes about it too often. I wish I have time to write about it every time I see them. And C2 should be ashamed of it, not annoyed.
Hi Matt, you are correct about the tracking is accurate once the strategy has “A” subscriber. but its NOT accurate before that. to you, as the system designer the system is fine. The developer made xx% last month, there is no glitch or cheat the system. But if i were one of the autotrader/subscriber. I will end up buying at market price which is ASK price, and sell BID. which David Juday explained, every trade will be a loss trying to scalp the bid/ask spread; as the strategy is design and shown proven record been doing well at. which i consider as misrepresentation.
My mistake on stating that the developer will also gain, because c2 then will actually take real trades from autotrader actual price. I take back what i said about c2 showing the wrong performance and equity curve. Because the system is accurate after having at least 1 subscriber. But from a subscriber perspective the developer didnt do anything different, he is just scalping every trade before i subscribed. But im no longer up xx% each month, but im actually down a small amount on every trade. here is an old famous scalping strategy that up 2000% but after you subscribe to autotrade, you lose the 0.05 spread every trade 20 trades per day. (yes this strategy is no longer public)
I think what OSUTAI was saying is that the strategy shows as profitable until it gets its first autotrader and then the system and the autotrader lose money. I do not believe anyone has said that C2 shows a system as profitable while autotrade subscribers are losing money - we all agree that there is no problem once a system has its first real subscriber.
It seems to me that there are more and more unrealistic HFT strategies available on C2.
If I would be a brand new (rookie) investor at C2, I wouldn’t know or suspect about all those filling discrepancies.
Of course I would lose money because of that.
And within a short time I would probably leave C2, assuming that I have been scammed by C2.
Even if I would find out later what happened, I would be very disappointed with C2, by giving those unrealistic strategies a social trading platform, allowing to deliberately lose hard earned real money .
Honestly, paying subscribers they don’t care if it is inaccurate to call those strategies a scam or not,
But if they lose money like that, they will believe they have been scammed, and they will quit C2.
And one thing that C2 can’t affort is to disappoint paying customers.
I agree with you… You mention the most important point here: “one thing that C2 can’t afford is to disappoint paying customers”
Again, the subscribers is the most important part here and C2 needs to find a way to protect them as much as possible. Period.
What ever you are going to do Matthew, put the subscribers first and above any question…It is really doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong…You must protect the subscribers from strategies that you KNOW in advance that nobody will makes money with them.
In my opinion, C2 should add the clone (demo) accounts copy for all strategies. Investors can refer to clone accounts to determine if they are subscribe or not.
I read this thread with interest as with copy trade business I always wondered about few things
If the signal providers are not trading a real account and thus has no real psychological pressure then as a subscriber how can I trust the system they are selling?
by the way although C2 is regulated the trade providers are not! that is another questio!
How realistic are the fills before a the strategy is actuality autotraded?
Sim trading can give false results! I am sure we all know that!
This may not matter for swing trading but for scalping the main point raised in this thread has merit
ie some trade leader knowingly or unknowingly might be misusing this feature of Bid Ask execution policy of C2!
Was there a conclusion?
I once sim traded a Synthetic arbitrage spread 1 SP x 5 ES using advance co located Autospreader from TT/ CQG
the results were too good to be true, when I asked around would this really work in real life experts said even with a high end co located auto spreaders this wont work!
Not trying to cast doubt on motives of C2 but the question raise dis a valid one is it not?
It appears to me that Collective2 has started adding warnings to strategies that appear to be using the Bid Ask execution policy to produce unrepeatable results, which I am very happy that they have done. See this warning on a strategy shows that it could be affected by this.
I am personally very glad C2 has started adding some warnings like this. This warning for “Unachievable Scalping” is very new I think. I know a few months ago they added a similar warning describing how some strategies have hidden tail risk. Both are big improvements for the community in my opinion. I would say it would be good if there is a way to eliminate the ability to do “Unachievable Scalping,” but in the interim this is a good solution in my opinion.
