The vendor of ESThunder reports by email that a Buy for ES was issued at 9:17 CT at 2035.75 which reached its 11 point target but C2 did not pick it up.
Can anyone from C2 explain what happened?
Thanks,
Karl
To let everybody else know:
Francis and Matthew reported via email that the missed trade was caused by a server disconnection caused by IB.
Karl
Actually, to clarify: There was an IB disconnection last night, but that was not the cause of the missing ESThunder trade Karl is asking about.
Very simply, we did not receive any trade signal from the system vendor at the time described.
Itâs worth keeping in mind that the system developer is using TradeStation, running on his own PC, to send signals to C2.
This isnât an issue of âblameâ - no one did anything wrong - itâs just an issue of probability: Using TradeStation to send orders to C2 is a great convenience for developers, and it allows C2 members to have access to many more strategies. But it also means there is one more link in the electronic transmission chain, and one more thing that can possibly fail. Hopefully this occurs only rarely, and the benefit of opening up a world of TradeStation strategies to C2 Members outweighs any downside of fairly rare occurrences.
In this specific case, while I have no doubt the system developerâs TradeStation really did generate an order as the system developer describes, we have no record of it at C2. So that suggests there could have been a temporary loss of connectivity at the system creatorâs office, or perhaps some other issue.
The good news is these sorts of things happen infrequently. My advice to all system vendors using a third-party signal generation tool like TradeStation is to keep an eye on your systems and make sure your C2 Model Account looks the way you expect it to.
(I hope to have a big announcement soon for those system developers who want to use a strategy scripting tool to generate their signals here at C2. More to come soon.)
Matthew
Absolutely concur that there are inherent risks involved in loosely coupled systems (in this case TS and C2 connection via the internet) But ESTHUNDER is not running on a home PC would be irresponsible given that there exist subscribers, but rather on mytradehost.com is a monitored hosting provider
This is purely my own analysis, but after analyzing the trades closely at both ends, the root cause of what transpired seems to be an issue involving TS - C2 interface where closing market orders are incorrectly interpreted as opening market orders. ESTHUNDER employs two types of exits, one an explicit Stop and another is a closing market order exit. In this case prior to the problematic trade, there was an open position and ESTHUNDER generated a close market order, but by the time this signal reached C2 the Stop for this open position had been hit (fast moving market). Unfortunately that closing market order was executed as a market order to open a new position in C2. And subsequently that unintended now open position was closed when the system issued a new market open order (at a loss, no longer matching the System at all, and missing a new trade that turned out to be profitable)
The probability that it would occur often is rather low but the financial markets best to assume that if you can imagine it, it will occur somehow and the next time may not be so lucky as to get away with a mere 10 PT loss.
ESTHUNDER going forward to be revised to curtail issuing closing market orders via the TS-C2 interface.
thanks,
ESCaptain
(System Developer ESTHUNDER)
Follow up since the last post, ESTHUNDER no longer taking market order exits but there seem to be other bugs in the Tradestation-C2 interface - there have been several crazy ghost trades that are not system generated the most glaring and awful of those was a 2 contract short 3/4/2015 was outrageous the system never trades more than 1 contract and furthermore the direction was utterly wrong costing a 7 PT loss with 2 contracts is a big blow
Collective2 more than its own new strategy language âseethuâ needs a robust and error free interface to the popular automated systems engines out there such as Tradestation or NinjaTrader Without that serious and powerful automated systems cannot be reliably traded on C2 and subscribers are left scratching their heads as to why great looking systems suddenly veer off course it may not be entirely because of the system but horrific glitches Technically it is fairly straightforward matter to engineer a custom DLL for Tradestation that could connect server-side to C2 servers to deliver accurate signals is rather trivial in the scheme of things, that way developers could incorporate such a DLL into their Tradestation strategies would be robust.
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