Hello,
Does anyone know how much time does the certification process take?
Also when You get certified do you have to change price for the strategy to $125?
MS
You can be certified in as little as 60 days (one of the C2Star requirements is that you need to outperform the SP500 over a rolling 60-day period, which means that you can’t officially be certified before day 60).
Regarding subscription price: you’ll need to create a new strategy to enter it into the C2Star program. When you apply for C2Star, the monthly subscription price will be set automatically to $125.
Hello Matthew,
Thanks for your reply. Why is it that I can’t be certified with an existing strategy? Current one has already some history, and creating a new one would require me to start fresh. As we know, positive trading history is what creates value here.
Moreover, can I plug in the strategy to the same account and have two same strategies working at the same time?
Kind Regards
MS
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Sorry, that’s not how the program works at this time.
So I need to close current strategy and start a new one? Is that the only option for me?
You don’t need to stop operating the strategy you are currently running. But to enter C2Star, you’ll be asked to create a new strategy,
Ok, huuh, it anyway seems it will not work the way I imagined.
One of the requirements of C2Star is to have a portfolio of $40-60k.
My algo operates on higher equity than $40-60k and size of the trades is adjusted to that equity size, profits are compounded so the higher the equity the higher the trade size for each algo.
I was pretty sure that “resizing” will solve this issue but as I learned today resizing only impacts equity and past trade sizes, however any new transactions will have the same size as I trade with higher equity. I was pretty sure that current transactions will be resized as well.
So I guess C2Star is not for me as I do not plan to decrease the trade size on my real account. Current trade sizing will easily breach 10% max drawdown rule for $40-60k equity.
If you have any other ideas how to be able to participate in C2Star, please let me know
MS
It would be nice if there were someway to check to see if a current strategy would have met all criteria, don’t want to waste time or money not knowing if a system really has a chance. This way it might be easy to see where adjustments need to be made in a system.
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There are some c2star systems have DD’ies more than 5%. How can this be?
The C2Star certified maximum drawdown is 5% in a 24 hour period. Max drawdown on the strategy is $5,000 peak to valley (it is not a %). Since accounts have to keep their balance between $40,000 and $60,000, the worse case max drawdown to stay certified is approx 11% (lose $4,999 on $45,000 balance). If the Trade Leader exceeds any one of the max drawdown requirements, their strategy is removed from the C2Star certification program
The requirement is not 5% drawdown per trade. It is 5% drawdown for total equity.
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I’m curious about one of the current C2Star certified strats, NASDAQ M. To test the rolling 60 day requirement, I look at their equity curve, set the slider to 60 days, and slide along looking to make sure it’s all ok. For this strategy, it seems to me that there was a 60+ day underperformance relative to SPX from about Sept 11 to Nov 13 (about 63 days), according to this graph. Is this not how to calculate the rolling performance? Is it perhaps 60 trading days (which would be closer to three months for equities)? Because to my eye, NASDAQ M should have lost certification at that date, and had the clock reset to build another 60 days rolling win over the SPX. @MatthewKlein could you clarify on calculations for this requirement? (ps, nothing against this strategy, just trying to understand the requirements)
The strategy is (currently) meeting C2Star requirements, as this excerpt from the C2Star status panel shows:
Also, when I compress the chart to the most recent 60-day window and eyeball the performance, it looks like the strategy does indeed exceed the SP500 index, as required by the program:
Remember that the charts don’t render all details, particularly when magnified, so the image may not correspond to the exact data points used in the return calculations.
Thanks @MatthewKlein, except here’s what I don’t understand yet. I see that NASDAQ M’s 60-day performance as of today clearly is ahead of SP500. But just as clearly I see that the performance was below the SP500 for a couple days around Nov 12. So… did NASDAQ M lose certification at that point, and then regain certification a few days later? That’s what confuses me. Or do short bouts of 60-day underperformance not automatically drop a strategy out of C2Star? Or perhaps did NASDAQ M only first get certified after Nov 13, when that brief period of underperformance would not have counted (ie, they didn’t apply for C2Star until Sept 13 or later)? Now do you see the problem? If NASDAQ M was certified during Nov 11-12, I think they should have lost certification at that point, and reapplied and required another 60-day period to get recertified… is this correct?
So long as you don’t violate risk controls, you can underperform the SP500 temporarily. In this case, you will temporarily lose certification, but if you regain it within 30 days (by outperforming the index on a rolling basis), you will regain the certification status.
In contrast, if you violate risk controls (i.e. drawdown or open loss) you are removed entirely from the program.
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Ah, that seems a sensible choice, and I didn’t see that anywhere in the requirements. Thanks for the enlightenment.
Would we be allowed to start a new strategy, that going forward will be exactly similar to an existing strategy, and then apply for C2Star for the new strategy? - and then continue to run 2 identical strategies?
@MatthewKlein, just to be sure, are leveraged ETFs allowed for a strategy aiming for c2star ? Thanks
Yes they are allowed.
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@MatthewKlein, re: the C2Star certification program
I hope that the C2Star program is successful. It seems that it is a qualified success, at least from the outside looking in. It seems to have attracted some strategies focused on meeting certification requirements and staying there, which seems no mean feat. Kudos for sticking to your guns about the strict requirements. I hope it is also attracting new subscribers to C2.
Although there was plenty of griping and sniping from the peanut gallery at first, that noise has quieted down and it looks to me like C2Star is fairly interesting. There’s been a fair amount of change at the top of the list (nobody seems to stay certified for many months at a time), but even those who fall off the star listing often re-apply it seems, and continue to produce strategies that are close enough to C2Star requirements that subscribers find them quite interesting. Obviously, we don’t see actual subscriber numbers, but there are several strategies who are not currently certified but have been in the past and continue to have substantial numbers of autotraders following them. C2Star looks like a program that has real potential, and trade leaders and subscribers both are seeing that, it seems.
Good luck, to you, to the trade leaders in the C2Star program, and to subscribers hoping to pick some winners.
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