For those of us who are autotrading but don’t have the luxury of being able to monitor each of the systems’ trades throughout the day it would be nice to add a “Suspend System” feature to the Setup Autotrading functionaliy. What this is basically is a setting whereby you can set a predetermined drawdown level for a particular system and if that drawdown level is breached, autotrading in that system is disabled and all open positions are closed out. The system is not unsubscribed, just the autotrading for that system suspended. It would then be up to the user what action to take thereafter.
It could be as simple as a textbox where users would have the option (or not) of entering some percentage drawdown whereby they would want to step back and reevaluate (perhaps 30% or so). A lot of the systems on C2, when they fail, do so spectacularly. It would be nice to have a stop gap measure like this in place so subscribers don’t inadvertently follow it into the ground. I think something like this would also go a long way into giving a significant level of added comfort with the idea of autotrading, potentially adding to the subscriber base.
I wholeheartedly agree and this is well-stated.gA
[LINKSYSTEM_35446586]
I agree that this would be nice at the C2 level, but just in case someone hasn’t noticed, OEC allows you to set a maximum daily loss limit, and maybe other brokers too.
Agreed, as a lot of systems on here are less than a year old.
A simple STOP when equity reaches below a certain pre-determined level.gA
[LINKSYSTEM_35446586]
What is the measure? Age or number of trades? I have an old system of 2 years, with 10 trades. Is it a better indicator of success in the system 3 months old with 150 trades? Only the number of trading can be a true indicator, the market is constantly changing in the short cycles on a daily basis.
I don’t have an Open E-Cry account, so I can’t speak to the settings that exist relevant to automated trading there. I use Interactive Brokers in tandem with TradeBullet which I assume is a fairly common configuration here and I can’t find any such settings in either TradeBullet or TWS. I would actually guess that what Open E-Cry may offer in terms of automated trading constraints would ~not~ be the norm with the majority of the various brokerages. Also, a daily loss limit is not the same as a drawdown delimiter, since drawdown would (probably) stretch across multiple trading days. Anyway, it seems to me that the drawdown calculation should be performed on the C2 side of things, since they have the trade history for a particular system locally. For those reasons, I think having this feature implemented on C2 is a logical and useful extension of existing functionality and would plug into the interfaces we already know work without any issues.
Matthew,
I love to get your take on this idea if you’ve got the time.
–Regards
It’s a good idea, and something we’ve been kicking around. I’d like to be able to implement some version of this in the next major AutoTrade software upgrade. More soon –
