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
