Ascendant TF Auto

Trading and Markets
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What are you thoughts on this relatively new system, Ascendant TF Auto? I joined recently and I have been hammered in January. We are now with an impossible 60% drawdown. Quite lost how to proceed, it is really a big loss but i do hesitate to get out right now.
Thanks in advance.
Santiago

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Some systems with the name ‘Ascendant’ in the system name have been profiled in Latest Martingale Systems (and other ways to go broke fast).

You can also search for ‘Ascendant’ in the forums and get some other threads where similar systems have been talked about.

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It appears that the Cambridge has made 9 strategies in the past. How can we see them all listed in the same place? We can’t. And that means Santiago has lost money because he was deceived by a promoter who not only hid his failed strategies from his profile but renamed them to make them even harder to find. (Beta TF, Beta ES etc.)

Is the community going to just look the other way and accept this bad behaviour? Or are we going to fight for what is right! No more hiding failed strategies!

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Once upon a time Collective2 used to allow everyone to see all of a vendor’s systems including previously failed ones even if they were officially killed and/or renamed.

I assume Matthew changed the website to no longer show killed systems to reduce clutter. Unfortunately this helps would be scammers to more easily hustle people on this website. Anytime they have a failed system they can just kill it and it disappears.

The problem with hiding a vendor’s “historical” activity/systems is that newcomers to the website might not see some key “red flags” (i.e. failed systems) for a specific vendor and then unknowingly subscribe to one of the vendor’s remaining systems that still look OK. I notice that the “martingale hustlers” on this site just make the failed systems disappear and keep the lucky systems showing up at the top of the best systems list.

My advice to any future Collective2 subscribers: Before subscribing to a system, verify that it is not a martingale system. I notice that martingale systems tend to show up often in the top 10 systems in the C2 Best Systems lists (or is a new system by one of those “top 10” vendors).

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It is right what you say but surely having to advise newcomers, who by their nature are likely to miss such advise anyway, is not the ideal solution. Instead we the users should all be asking C2 to drastically improve the transparency, accountability, and all-round integrity of the site.

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I agree. I and others have asked for such changes during the past several years. This site has previously had those changes but then the site owner makes “improvements” and those previous changes “magically” disappear (kind of like some of the failed systems around here).

After some recent “complaints” and forum discussions regarding some of the nefarious systems, I notice that rather than doing more to make this website and the systems more transparent and the vendors more accountable, Collective2 simply made the disclaimer (“These are hypothetical performance results that have certain inherent limitations. Learn more.”) font significantly larger, highlighted with color and no longer hideable (previously you could hide this text at the top of the screen for a day [or maybe even a week]), and removed the “clutter” by no longer listing killed systems in the vendor’s profile.

I feel that the C2 owner prefers a “caveat emptor” approach to providing the world with self-serve trading advice. I believe that philosophy limits the success of this website and the subscriber base.

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I couldn’t agree more. But what I don’t understand is why do it? Is the extra cash from the bad guys really that substantial? I mean it couldn’t be that financial rewarding to promote bad behaviour… could it!!!

So far logical reasoning has not worked. So what else can we do to convince C2 to eliminate misleading and deceptive practices?

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Cameron didnt you have a CAC40 system here at c2 ?

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I really do not understand why C2 is not more transparent. I know quite a few investors here in Europe eager to invest but right now I would recommend anyone to risk their money with some many dubious systems, mainly because some of them are family or friends. Enough for me to loose already my money!
I am with you Cameron, do not understand at all the logic of not being transparent. But I will tell you something. In the long run it always pays off.
If I continue loosing money because of these scams sooner or later I will have to leave C2, and not out of my will but because I am losing money at the end.

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You gentlemen bring up some good points.

I’ll address them here (in what I am afraid will be a long post), and then cross-link this message into the main C2 forum for more visibility.

I think I can fairly summarize the issue that you raise as follows:

You are concerned that it is too simple for trading strategy developers to walk away from bad track records or to hide them.

I agree with some aspects of what you wrote, disagree with other specific aspects (some of what you wrote is not factually correct, but I’ll get to that in a minute), and am not entirely convinced about some other aspects of your posts.

But - before I address the details - let me make a more general observation.

First, I’m really happy that anyone even cares enough to post messages critical of C2, or to make suggestions, or even to be dismayed about software design choices we take.

This means you care about C2, and its community of traders. So for that, thank you. Of course, as you might imagine, any time someone criticizes your work, or questions your motivations, it can personally be hurtful (an interesting thought experiment: try to imagine that there is a forum on the internet where people at your current job publicly post what they don’t like about your work on a project, and others insist this bad work that you’ve done was surely caused by your dubious ethics. No, I’m not looking for sympathy; I know it comes with the territory… but I’m just pointing out that sometimes it’s hard not to react with natural human emotion when you are criticized publicly in this way).

The truth is, everyone here at C2 tries our best to build and run a stable, well-designed platform for automated trading. There are different parties with different interests (strategy creators, strategy users, regulators), and we try to balance the various interest (well, some, like regulators, always trump others!), while maintaining the honesty and viability of the platform. We don’t always get it right, and over the years we’ve tweaked and changed some things, but this is the general goal.

Now, let’s talk about the issue of whether failed systems are visible enough on C2.

There are a few aspects to this, and I’d like to address them individually.

A few months ago, I personally worked on a new feature that allows strategy developers to maintain a “public profile” here on C2, sort of a curriculum vitae of his trading-strategy work. From a business-strategy perspective, the goal was to make the C2 Profile a standard part of the way traders presented themselves to the public. For example, I hoped that someday it would be very common to see links to C2 Profiles appear on LinkedIn or trading-related sites, and even on resumes.

So, I made the decision to let people decide which part of their trading history to highlight on their public profile. The idea was: on the public profile (i.e. the stuff a casual LinkedIn user might see) you could control the content, but once someone wanted to know more about you, he could learn more details on C2, including a list of failed trading strategies you had previously developed.

That was my intent.

Where this plan fell short was that I didn’t realize recent site redesigns had made it very hard to find a history of failed systems, even for those users who made an effort to do such research. In other words, I had assumed the “public profile” could be less detailed, because all content on the C2 site itself would be more detailed.

But somewhere along the way, this content on the C2 site had gotten very hard to find.

This was a “fail,” to be frank, and needs to be addressed. The way I intend to address it is to restore a feature that previously was visible on older versions of the site, but which was removed (without much thought) during one of the several site redesigns: a link on a “strategy page” which shows a list of all other strategies a developer has created.

This, I think, will be a reasonable balance between strategy-creator desire and strategy-user desire: it lets strategy developers feel comfortable showing to the outside public the work they are proud of, while also allowing anyone who wants to learn more about a strategy developer to retrieve full details about his work history.

I will try to implement this one soon.

Now, let me turn to a second issue some of you raised. Some of you believe C2 simply lets people “hide” bad strategies by setting the maximum number of subscribers to zero.

This is not technically accurate.

In order to explain why, and also, to give an example of how C2 is constantly evolving and iterating (and, I like to think, improving), let me tell you the story behind this software feature.

Many years ago, there was no way to hide a trading strategy. You had a strategy; it was visible. Period.

Then I began to notice something. There were a few people who tried to take advantage of the C2 business model by hosting their system track record on C2, but not allowing anyone to subscribe on C2. Their goal was to reach private arrangements with subscribers, in order to avoid paying C2 any portion of subscription revenue.

Perhaps some of you reading this think this is perfectly fair, but - without going into a lot of detail - let me just say this is not a sustainable business model for my company. I couldn’t afford to run the site if everyone did that.

So… many years ago, I changed the rules slightly. If you set your “Maximum Number of Subscribers” to zero (or if your system maxed out on whatever number you set) C2 no longer showed your system to potential subscribers. (We always allow people to request individual exceptions to this policy, by the way.)

And then, guess what happened? Just what you expect: people who had failed systems tried to game this by setting their maximum number of subscribers to zero.

So I went back to the drawing board, and I changed the software yet again. Now it began to operate as follows: “If you have no more subscriber slots free, we won’t show your system. …Except in cases where your system has a negative return (i.e. has lost money).”

The thinking was (and still is, for this is exactly how the software still operates), this solves all the problems: No one can hide bad systems, and not many people are going to want to subscribe “off-platform” to failed systems anyway.

… So that’s the background. (Sorry for the verbal diarrhea; I just want to demonstrate that much of the way C2 operates is the result of an iterative “learning process.”)

With this in mind, let me address one of the accusations someone made here in this forum:

Actually, Chris, this is working as expected. Because here is what this system looks like:

So, okay, sure, it’s not a great system, and not one I would ever subscribe to, but my point is, it’s still profitable in aggregate, and thus C2 refuses to show it. Again, this policy prevents bad actors from undermining the business model of the site. This policy is a reasonable compromise, in my opinion.

In conclusion, I appreciate many of the posts here, and the spirit in which they were offered. I’ll try to address the most urgent issue raised here (the difficulty of discovering previous failed strategies created by a strategy developer) as soon as I can get to it.

But the main point of my long, long, post here (sorry!) is to suggest that there is no nefarious attempt to decrease “transparency” on C2. Indeed, I like to think any reasonable person would have to conclude that the platform is more transparent than virtually anything out there, including hedge funds and CTAs.

I will continue working on this. Thanks for your feedback.

Matthew

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Just a quick reaction to your email. Bravo! This is the kind of service and professionalism I expect. Thank you for your time and addressing our concerns. We will all gain with this.
All the best,
Santiago

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Thanks for the reply Matthew.

In regard to the ability to hide a “failed” system (with a high drawdown) which might have been “lucky” enough to get back to positive before being hidden, can you not also force the viewing to be allowed for any system with a drawdown of 50%+ (and any other drawdown number that you deem a vendor would want to hide)?

If you changed the logic to look at the drawdown too (or maybe just the drawdown by itself will do), then this vendor would not have been able to hide the 90% drawdown.

I understand that the vendor managed to keep the final profit positive, but most times I imagine they are really trying to hide the drawdown behavior which is more likely to scare off potential subscribers and out themselves as risky and/or martingale style traders.

You know the saying–where there is smoke, there is fire! (and in this case the 90% drawdown is the smoke) [and Ascendant TF Auto or some other system with serious money lost by a subscriber is the fire]

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I am wondering how this system continues to hold a position that requires $16,200 of overnight maintenance margin when the declared account value (even excluding fees and commissions) is $13,038 per the Model Account Details?!

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Thanks Matt. It would be great to see the updates you mentioned. One more thing please - I know that some people rename failed strategies in order to hide them. We need a way to stop that, perhaps simply that nobody is ever allowed to rename a strategy.

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Nice timing of this post Cameron. Ascendant TF Auto has just been renamed to TF Auto and doesn’t allow any new subscribers.

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It doesnt make a diffrence hence you can see all developers’ systems under their profiles .