I noticed that my C2 rating changed today – a non-market day. What’s up with that? I have only been with C2 a week, and am not even supposed to have a rating, but I do. Just trying to understand what is going on…
I suggest to use the search function on the forum. The ratings have been debated over and over again, so you can find a lot of information about them in the forum.
That took some time, and I didn’t really find an answer to my question about why why C2 ratings would change on non-market days. I just found that some one else reported the same thing, but there was no explanation. I found a thread which ending last May with Matthew promising to revamp C2’s rating system and make it more transparent, but it looks like that hasn’t happened yet due to other priorities – quite understandable.
My main point is that according to C2’s own description of ratings, I shouldn’t even have one yet as I have only been with C2 one week. I agree that a month should be required. But when I posted a forum message and when I created a C2 ‘badge’ for my web site, I found I had a C2 rating over 700, but now over the weekend it has dropped a few hundred points. If the early process is this volatile, couldn’t ratings just be hidden until 30 days have passed?
Also… is there a way to reference another forum thread or post by number or provide a link? That would save people a lot of time searching through unrelated forum debates. Oh, and some forum threads did not appear when I clicked on the link – as if they had been deleted, but were still listed in the index and came up in searches. Not sure what’s going on there.
I’m not sure, but one possible explanation is that it is a matter of updating. Since it is a relative rating, your rating can probably change when other vendors update their statistics (I understand from other threads that vendors can do this).
Also, I’m not sure of this either, but I think that the Annualized return is based on the number of days between today and the start of the system, including non-market days. So it will change during non-market days too. That will have a relatively large effect when the system is young. E.g. if your system started on Monday and on Friday you have 1% profit, then on Friday your Annualized return percentage would be (1%) * (365 / 5) but on Saturday it would be (1%) * (365 / 6). That will in turn affect your rating.
The ratings could be hidden for young systems, but frankly, there aren’t many people who take them seriously anyway.
Regarding the references, well, I could have done the search for you but it would take about the same time for me because there are many threads where it is discussed.
Thanks, Jules. I was also suspecting that the calcs include non-market days, but I don’t understand this since it would be relatively easy to use only market days. I don’t think the resaon for the changes I’ve seen in my rating over the weekend is due to my relative ranking changing due to other traders ratings being revised. I’ve seen such a large change from Friday to Saturday and again to Sunday, that I am fairly sure it must be due to including non-market days in the calcs.
Yes, its clear that they are not taken too seriously here at C2, but if MK is encouraging vendors to put his medalion with the live updated C2 rating on their own sites as I did, many other vendors are also likely to do this early in their C2 history, and those rating numbers jumping wildly around doesn’t help C2’s or my credibility.
According to C2, each night, your trading system is assigned a ranking, and a graphical image is created and placed on their servers. The problem that those rating numbers are jumping wildly around is because it takes into account open positions. Some statistics which includes open positions are calculated daily, some only on weekends, some only on monthends etc.,…
Rankings are calculated each night. Yes, they include open equity and open trades’ P/L. They really don’t “jump around” very much for most systems, but I could imagine they would change very substantially for brand new systems which have very limited data (like yours, Donald). In those cases, a single trade – even a single day’s results – obviously has large impact on overall results.
If you think your score is highly variable – too much to be explained by the explanation above – then by all means let me know. Be sure to include all relevant data to support your case that the ranking is incorrect.
Pal, open positions will always be factored into up-to-date P/L calculations at C2. That is the way the entire financial industry works. I don’t think it’s likely to change anytime soon.
Matthew, thanks for your reply. FTR, I am not saying that my current rating is in error – just that numbers are probably not valid due to insufficient data and would probably be better shown as ‘insufficient data’. I can see that ratings might go lower for holding positions over the weekend due to the risk inherent in doing so, but at least on percentage basis, the change I’ve seen on my system this weekend doesn’t seem proportional to this risk.
Since you suggest I do so, I’ll send the particulars by private email as I recall them, but I expect you have better C2 rating records in your database than I have in my memory.
>I am not saying that my current rating is in error – just that numbers are probably not valid
This is a contradiction. Either the rating is not in error and therefore valid or they are in error, so they are not valid. Which is it? My guess is that they are not completely valid nor completely invalid either. Most of the statistics computed at C2 seem to be in this state of limbo, between existence and non-existence…
ps: For man, sensory material is only the first step of knowledge, the basic source of information. Until he has conceptualized this information, man cannot do anything with it cognitively, nor can he act on it. Human knowledge and human action are conceptual phenomena.
If a casual observer to conclude that a stick actually bends in water, such a snap judgment would be a failure on the conceptual level, a failure of thought, not of perception. To critize the senses for it is tantamount to criticizing them for their power, for their ability to give us evidence not of isolated fragments, but of a total. The function of the senses, is to sum up a vast range of facts, to condense a complex body of information - which reaches our consciouosness in the form of a relatively few sensations. Our sensations do not, of course, identify any of these facts, but they do constitute our first form of grasping them and our first lead to their later scientific discovery. Science, indeed, is nothing more than the conceptual unravelling of sensory data; it has no other primary evidence from which to proceed.
If a “valid” sense perception means a perception the object of which is an existent, then not merely a man’s senses are valid. All sense perceptions are necessarily valid. If an individual of any species perceives at all, then no matter what its organs or forms of perception, it perceives something that is. Conceptualization involves an interpretation that may not conform to reality, an organization of data that is not necessitated by physical fact; one can, therefore, “think about nothing,” i.e., nothing real, such as a perpetual-motion machine or demonic possession or Santa Claus. But the senses sum up automatically what is.
Although concepts are built on percepts, they represent a profound development, a new scale of consciousness. An animal knows only a handful of concretes: the relatively few trees, ponds, men, and the like it observes in its lifetime. It has no power to go beyond its observations - to generalize, to identify natural laws, to hypothesize casual factors, or, therefore, to understand what it observes. A man, by contrast, may observe no more (or even less) than an animal, but he can come to know and understand facts that far outstrip his limited observations. He can know facts pertaining to all trees, every pond and drop of water, the universal nature of man. To man, as a result, the object of knowledge is not a narrow corner of a single planet, but the universe in all its immensity, from the remote past to the distant future, and from the most miniscule (unperceivable) particles of physics to the farthest (unperceivable) galaxies of astronomy.
A similar contrast applies in the realm of action. An animal acts automatically on its perceptual data; it has no power to project alternative courses of behavior or long-range consequences. Man chooses his values and actions by a process of thought, based ultimately on a philosophical view of existence; he needs the guidance of abstract principles both to select his goals and to achieve them. Because of its form of knowledge, an animal can do nothing but adapt itself to nature. Man (if he adheres to the metaphysically given) adapts nature to his own requirements.
A conceptual faculty, therefore, is a powerful attribute. It is an attribute that goes to the essence of a species, determining its method of cognition, of action, of survival. To understand man - or any human concern - one must understand concepts. One must discover what they are, how they are formed, and how they are used, and often misused,
in the quest for knowledge.
