Autotrading regressing

It is one thing that a piece of software that costs us $1,200 per year is regressing and stops supporting autotrade in a linked account.

But (and) the way it is handled by C2 is objectionable.

It is announced 2 weeks ahead of the regression. What happens to my ‘software license fee’ if it happens to expire two weeks later? Similarly: what happens to my subscription fees to my autotrading systems?

Obviously C2 will lose a bunch of subs. I don’t quite understand why this is good for them (and I didn’t think much about it, because I don’t really care.)

It is conceivable that the e-mailed trade signals can be parsed and processed [I asked if they were committed keeping e-mail notifications – didn’t get a response… It may be the next to go!] But to publish some standard form (XML?), commit to it, announce it 2-3 months (and not 2 weeks) ahead of time would be the proper way to handle this regression.

Assuming, of course that you accept that a $1,200 system can regress at all.

So what does that mean, no autotrading in the future? How did you get the News?

No, Alexander - jozsika is complaining that we are turning off a single feature in C2’s AutoTrading panoply: the “You May Manual Trade In Your AutoTrade Account At the Same Time You AutoTrade” feature.

Actually, turning off this feature makes me sad! We spent a lot of time, money, and heartache building the technology behind it, and we are still very proud of it. Basically, it recognized any trade that “appeared” in a broker account, but which wasn’t placed by our software, was a “manual trade”; and the position created by the trade was carved out so that AutoTrade wouldn’t touch it.

And this magic worked really well… about 98% of the time!

But it was the other 2% that was the killer. Things completely outside of C2’s control – manual back-office account adjustments by the broker (which happen surprisingly frequently), early option assignments, busted trades, broker API disconnections and reconnections, etc. – all of these things, which we have no control over, caused the software to treat positions as “manually traded” when, in fact, they were part and parcel of AutoTrading.

Most of our customers want a simple, reliable, out-of-the-box AutoTrading experience. It’s true that, with simplicity, you give up some freedom. Under the new paradigm, if you want to engage in your own manual trading while also AutoTrading, you’ll need a second broker account or a sub-account to do so. You just can’t do it in the same account where AutoTrade is still working.

But we made a business decision that we’d rather serve the majority of customers really well, providing them with a reliable, simple clean experience that they can understand fully – rather than trying to be all things to all people, and trying to serve sophisticated highly-technical users alongside those users who just want to “set it and forget it.”

We deprecated the feature for newly signing-up accounts over a month ago. Now we have announced to older customers still using the “manual trading alongside autotrading” feature that we will sunset it in two weeks. I do apologize if that was not enough time to allow you to transition away from the feature comfortably.

It’s never easy removing features from software that required a lot of effort to build, and which a lot of people still really like. I can understand why this decision is frustrating to our members who have come to appreciate and rely on it. It wasn’t an easy decision to make. But C2 is making an effort to improve all aspects of its AutoTrade experience, and this was a business decision that I think is in the best interest of the company, and most (though, admittedly, not all) of its customers.

jozsika, if you have specific questions about your account, I’ll try to answer them privately. If you wouldn’t mind, please send your specific questions to help@collective2.com, and we can discuss your questions and options.

P.S. What’s not changing: you can still AutoTrade as many strategies as you like in a single brokerage account. It doesn’t matter if one strategy goes long while the other goes short the same symbol. You can still adjust your AutoTrade-created positions: make them bigger, make them smaller, close them early. You can still set your own personal stop loss for any strategy. These things are not changing.

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I agree with you, Matthew, that 98% reliability is way too low for a system handling real $$. I can also sympathize that after years of efforts you decided to throw in the towel and accept failure. I have to tell you, I would feel way more sympathetic if you labeled your software as ‘alpha’ or ‘beta’ until it can reliable handle the features you manage to implement, instead of charging for it $1,200 per year.

[I am not sure how disabling manual trade will stabilize your system. Although you refused to publish a post-mortem during the last melt down, so we are still in the dark about what happened, but it had nothing to do with manual trade. Your system lost connectivity and when re-connected, instead of realizing what happened it closed and re-opened all trades. Nothing to do with manual trading enabled or disabled.]

Seems to me that you move in a direction when you have more and more control over the account of your subs. I have no way of deciding whether this is indeed only a matter of reaching the limits of the complexity your system can handle (like the current announcement) or a business decision. E.g. I asked you publicly (when you announced the 500% scale limit that has nothing to do with complexity but a lot has to do with control) whether you are committed to keep the e-mail order notification feature alive and you refused to answer the question.

So what about instead of apologizing, extending the cutoff time? I have to stop autotrading all my systems by June 14, even if my subscription runs to June 30. And your help desk informed me that I will NOT get a pro-rated refund, even though this is the consequence of your decision, without asking us or the system developers.

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Mathew, I’m the person that is forced to use broker transmit option (pay $99 per month) to do manual trading. I don’t want to split funds in account and I want to utilize margin to run my stuff.

Is it possible for people like me, forgive $99 per month and limit out strategy as always PRIVATE? In this case customer can do discretionary/private trading under strategy that is never going to be released to public and it is truly private.It means, as long strategy is private, you don’t charge monthly fee.

Actually, this can improve strategies quality on C2 and attract more capital. Developer will be allow to create strategy first few months history for free or very low monthly fee in PRIVATE mode and when he decides strategy is ready, he will switch to PUBLIC mode and regular monthly fee. Overall less junk strategies on C2, better quality strategies will attract more customers.

I appreciate the interesting idea, but we won’t be changing our pricing at this time.

We have no plans to remove email notifications of buy/sell trade signals.