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As I am planning to take my fiveHedged strat “TOS” (hopefully next week), I just wanted to ask fellow TOS-certified Trade-Leaders about any advantages/disadvantages in their experience of BrokerTransmit vs Self-Autotrade.
As TL’s will know, there are two options C2 offers for attaining TOS status. The first is via BrokerTransmit (where my live trading account fills would be copied to C2), and Self-Autotrade (which is the quicker/faster/cheaper option for TL’s), which just means subscribing to my own strat and auto-trading it.
As I am mulling over the two, it has occurred to me, that if I was to go the BrokerTransmit route, I would theoretically get my trades executed using broker fills, instead of waiting for the slower C2-autotrade route, which would also imply ‘competing’ for fill-prices with other investors who subscribe/autotrade the strategy via C2.
What about speed-of-fills/execution? How efficient is C2 at copying the trades once BrokerTransmit has been filled?
Any info/experience/counsel would be welcome before I decide which is the best route…
BT is nice because it is no extra cost on certain plans and lets you use the broker platform you are accustomed to. The catch is if you want to add money or withdraw money from that account it can mess up your ability to fully use the equity in the C2 strategy. If your real account has $100k and the C2 strategy has $100k it works great. If you want to spend $50k in real money then you end up having a $50k brokerage trying to lead a $100k strategy and will only be able to send half the orders to the strategy you want.
Autotrade is nice in that it gives you more flexibility to add or take away money in your real account and just change the scale as you need to. It also seems to put you on more equal footing with your subs. Another nice benefit is that though the C2 webtrader can be a bit slow C2 has lots of interesting and useful ways to enter orders using API. Sending orders to C2 from my own programs has become my favorite way to send orders. The downside is of course the extra fees for autotrade.
Thanks Charles. I really appreciate your input. I am inclined to go the AutoTrade route - at least for now - as I have not considered the cash-withdrawal/deposit element of BT (which is actually a very important point/consideration).
No problem. One other thing I have run into is some brokers give you immediate access to make new purchases with proceeds from a sale like Interactive Brokers. Others like C2Broker require you to wait a few days. Just make sure that whichever broker you follow with has what you need on that front or you will get lots of emails about not having enough settled cash to make a trade which can then jeopardize your TOS badge.
Glad I posted this request now - good to know these intricacies (thankfully I am not with C2B). Hopefully should be good to go next week with TOS (Self-Autotrade).
Just had a quick chat with broker - one solution (for BrokerTransmit) would be to split the account, so there is a fixed sum allocated to C2…
So, for instance, with $100k, if I allocate $20k to the C2 split-account, and then just leave it alone (dedicated) without deposits/withdrawals, this would work, although one can never foretell an emergency when cash is needed for future withdrawals.
I am considering going the BT route but will need a premium a/c at C2, which I am reluctant to do - maybe use it to add a long-only equivalent to the fiveHedged.
The objective is to get the strategy TOS certified.
This ultimately is a good thing.
Yes nice idea. That is the way to do it if you are going to do BT. Have a dedicated account that you have no intention of changing the balance on. Also just make sure you have a large enough account to do that and not have the auto trade and subscription fees show up as too high of a drag on the equity curve on C2.
Yes thanks - better to put a smaller fixed sum (without withdrawals/deposits) and let the rest in other accounts. The only issue now is that I have to sign up to premium on C2. Its not the cost, but its superfluous. I might start 2 more strats on there, perhaps a long-only version of fiveHedged, and an options-put-writing strat (which I do quite a lot of).
@fiveHedged Nice thoughts, I was wondering the same. Another thought about broker transmit: would it be possible to use your trading platform to enter trades in way so they are hidden from C2 and not being broadcasted right away after entering, but only until the trade is actually executed? Using market-if-touched, or IB’s algo would maybe prevent C2 from broadcasting the trade way before it’s executed. My strategy does a few trades per month, pre entered the day before. It would be really easy for an investor to subscribe once, and forward the C2 mail to a mailinglist or something.
Also, for withdrawals or currency conversions, it’s probably easy to temporarily pause the broker transmit. For instance, I would convert usd to eur every now and then.
PS. I just noticed the 4th package for trade leaders has been removed, the one that returns 100% of investor fees
