Buying/Selling Options Spreads. Opening 4 legs at once

C2
1

Hello there,

This is a request that has been asked and answered before, but I’m very interested in understanding C2’s position on it as it doesn’t make sense to me.

Recently, I incurred a substantial loss as an order didn’t get filled because C2 doesn’t provide trade leaders the ability to open 4 legs at once. The reason is that some of their broker partner APIs don’t allow this. So, in order to be ‘compatible’ with as many brokers as possible, the trade leaders have to leg-in.

Now, the mission of C2 is very simple: To make its users money and mitigate risk.

Isn’t it?

Well, that is not the case in this particular scenario, because I’ve incurred a big loss (and other subscribers have) because of this limitation, that would have been avoided otherwise. C2 favored compatibility over capital protection.

It’s not a good user experience. I’m sure your intentions are good and you want to give investors more brokering options, but in reality, if it means added risk, that defeats your original purpose: make users money.

You have 2 options.

  1. Be compatible with most brokers and inject additional risk with “legging-in”
  2. Be compatible with fewer brokers but protect users capital by allowing to open all legs at once.

Believe me, if you told me that I could have avoided this loss by opening an account at a different broker to be compatible with the strategy I’m following, I would have been VERY happy to do it!

It’s not to the trade leader to adapt to C2, it’s to C2 to adapt to the needs of the industry.

C2 chose to lower the bar to match the brokers with the worst set of features instead of raising the bar to match the brokers with the best set of features.

I strongly believe it is time to re-think this decision.
It’s sad because I’m trying to find another auto-trading platform for options that allows this and will stop following strategies that trade options on C2 (unless this is changed. I’m certain I’m not the only one).

Maybe a vote would be in order?
Getting the pulse of your paid users would be in the majority’s interest.

Thanks,

2

Would you be willing to share the strategy you are talking about? I just saw this one blow up today. I’m not sure if the stats are correct though since before today it was showing +700%. Now even the past months are showing loses. https://collective2.com/details/126499850

3

I will be very interested to see how things resolve with that strategy’s track record. I cannot imagine all those subscribers signed up for the trade results or equity curve that is currently shown. Especially, given the significant number of autotraders following it for the past month.

4

I received word today that C2 incorrectly reported the P/L for this strategy’s in-the-money options settlements. I corrected the track record to show the right settlement prices. Just to be clear: this incorrect calculation did not cause trading losses; instead, we did not accurately report losses which occurred when options settled in the money. I have fixed the problem going forward, and I apologize for this mistake.

5

The calculations are complete?
-604% is correct?