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.