All of us who are part of C2, can help grow this community. For investors, it is great to have more and better strategies. For traders, it is very important to have a network of potential investors that is bigger every day. We need a growing number of subscribers.
How to make the C2 network bigger? I suggest increasing the number of associated Brokers.
c2 needs VC money. I need a few million dollars for ppc ads.
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- a couple more high quaility systems - thatĀ“s organic and needs time
- an improvement to the affiliate reward for anyone who brings in more paying customers/subscribers. For example a rebate system could work very well and C2 could be creative here. Just an example from on top of my head: instead of paying the current time-limited provision C2 could grant the same 10% revenue share but for lifetime in a rebate system. The rebate credit could be used for paying listing fees, subscription fees, autotrading fees, featuring feesā¦ So the money would actually never get out of the system completely thus improving C2Ā“s free cashflow while incentivizing affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a key component in online marketing these days. Wake up guys and make it sexy.
(@MatthewKlein) - clear focus on exchange traded instruments would help to give C2 a clear and distinct marketing profile. There are many - and even better - copy trading sites for FOREX out there. Focus on what makes you exclusive. Of course thatĀ“s subjective but I donĀ“t see C2 as āone fits allā trading site anyways. ItĀ“s kind of niche let alone for the relatively high fees. ThatĀ“s not bad at all, just use it for your advantage.(@MatthewKlein)
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From a subscriber standpoint, I would like to be able to trade all of my accounts with 1 login. Taxable trading, Traditional, Roth IRAās. I want to be able to subscribe to the same strategy in each account.
C2 should offer referral credits. 10%. If I can bring on board 10 new members, my monthly membership is free as long as they are still a paying member.
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You can advertise your C2 system(s) on Facebook even if you have a very small budget, no need to spend 1000ās on PPC search engine ads (you can still do that later if you want):
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Iām donāt want to do any affiliate marketing of products that my friends or other people can lose all their money. Strategies main characteristic compared to other products is very short time to live and almost 100% probability of failure. And the failure is mostly related to lack of responsibility of strategy developer. Is affiliated market still innocent? You donāt see mutual or hedge funds ads/prospects targeting AlexanderG unless he is an accredited investor.
One more thing. Affiliate marketer will advertise products that statistical bayer will lose much more money compared to investing in any other investment products (strategies are far more volatile on average than average investment products). What it says about affiliate marketer? Cold blood wrong doing?
Brilliant idea indeed, a total win-win situation.
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This is a great question, I think C2ās great strength is this amazing middle-ware that can connect arbitrary trading platforms to arbitrary brokers essentially and execute/publish trades is incredible There should be an offering catering only to traders interested in leveraging this middle-ware who have no interest in obtaining subscribers is one thing to consider, the middleware should be rented to traders for lower cost (with no subscribers) and that middleware can be further strenghtened for execution speed across platforms and brokers. And also something that connects traders with other traders in C2 to provide collaborative team based systems, in other words develop more of a community of traders instead of currently each system developer is competing for subscribers Another improvement idea is for C2 to run a proper datacenter which can house a trading system with direct connection to C2 execution framework trading system createrors should be provided direct connections to the data center to properly run their systems. these are some brainstormed ideas
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I think an idea would be to provide āOpenly Traded Fundsā, i.e. strategies that donāt do anything secret, but have a specified and publicly known way to trade (similar to ETFs). I am currently trying such an idea (2-way volatilty), with a very small convenience fee. These can be advertised broadly, on Twitter and elsewhere. Perhaps C2 can introduce a $0 fee for subscribers that only use such openly traded funds, or even have a branch that implements such funds following clients requests. The idea would be to ālureā people into using C2, with the hope that they will later follow some other proprietary strategy, while paying the corresponding funds.
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Stimulate organic growth. Make strategies label as private 100% free of any regular fees associated with running strategy .
More developers will work on private label strategies, possibility of them subscribing to other developers strategies, less crappy strategies released to public (developer will make sure that he has a chance to make money before switching strategy to public mode with regular fees), more quality strategies released to public (developer will make sure that potential benefit switching strategy to public mode covers cost of running strategy), much cleaner developer profile (private strategies should never be count in strategies created by developer).
Overall quality of strategies on C2 should increase, bringing more interest, developers and customers from outside.
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C2 has started to advertise on futures.io (former BigMike forum). Rod is there on Ask me anything topic.
And they are working on āpay if profitable featureā.
āPay if profitableā would be a great feature, along with scaling of fees in par with scaling % of the strategy.
In my opinion, fees should be assessed individually on a monthly basis for each subscriber, based on their own personal previous month volume (scaling %) and performance.
Fees would then be charged afterwards, as a % of real dollars gain per subscriber (only if positive).
This would be a win-win feature for everybody.
Unfortunately it seems not possible in C2
I forgot to add a link.
Agree with your idea, seems most honest way with fees. And would reduce number of Martingale gamblers.
Regarding āpay if profitableā feature, how can you prevent someone from abusing it?
One can subscribe at the start of a month and unsubscribe before the end of the month.
Then he can change a new name and new account, and repeat it next month.
I would say " refund if unprofitable" is better and can prevent abuse.
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One more comment regarding strategy labeled as private. Strategy labeled as private is non-profit strategy (developer doesnāt seek to do business on C2 and gain subscribers). Society/tax regulations give non-profit organizations many relieves. Regular fee charges for private strategy by C2 is abuse of power and against the common norms.
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The fee structure could be split in a flat fee + an incentive fee.
Flat fee would be paid in advance and would cover the cost of managing a strategy.
Performance fee would be paid afterwards to reward outperformance (over a benchmark for example).
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I believe that if we work together C2, traders and investors, we can build a solid growth plan. For example, traders could offer some free strategies and C2 would not charge us for these strategies either.
It would also be important for strategies to be public after a time of operation privately. C2 should not charge during these months.
Marketing and publicity. A lot of marketing and lots of publicity.
As a subscriber, I agree with Clemās comment above because it would be less expensive to build a portfolio of systems. Iāve been fighting Tradestation for over a week now trying to get my money out and into C2 compatible brokers, but Iām hoping to choose several strategies (all autotraded) for both a futures account and a stock/options account, and so the amount allocated to any one strategy would only be some fraction of the total $265K account size.
It seems that the lifetime of good strategies at C2 is not very long based on a āGridā search for minimum 2 years and various return vs. drawdown combinations, and there are only a very few systems still here since my last account in 2005-6 (eg. extreme-os is an example).
So I would second Clemās suggestion where larger accounts that are autotrading would pay proportionally higher fees, with some minimum subscription fee for the economics to work with the system vendors (and for manual traders maybe hte same default fees as now). If enough larger accounts are there for good systems, Iād think the vendors would do better with this scheme overall if their systems are good, while the poor systems would not fare so well. But this is all from a subscriber viewpoint, and since I assume most vendors are not RIAs, this scheme may be a legal problem and C2 could not implement it for that reason. Just my $0.02 as a (soon to be) subscriber.
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I think an āincentive feeā aka performance fee of some sort sounds nice in theory. In practice every developer already has a strong incentive to achieve excellent results - thatĀ“s how one can win the competition over subscribtions. In fact any performance fee rewards high-flyers that eventually crash and burn even more than currently.
Look at investment banks and heads of big companies. Do bonuses and perks motivate them to achieve better long term results? No, most of them focus on the short term even more.
Adjusted fees according to the subscribers scaling% is another thing though. Having the subscription fee scaling in sync with the autotrading% could actually be for the benefit of smaller accounts (if it also scales down below 100%). By using this method we could get rid of the scaling cap at 500% aswell.
Unfortunately this will stay an often called idea as long as there is no deal with the regulators, I fear.
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The recent slew of posts has some interesting ideas regarding fees. The problem is that the regulatory bodies in this space (at least here in the States) take a very dim view of some of the ideas posted given no registered investment advisory/advisor configuration, even though they are good ideas in my opinion.
There may be a way around some of this for those outside our borders, but for U.S. Citizen subscribers I would suggest that the current regulations make it such that c2 is really boxed in on what they can do in this space. Once there is a variable fee or some individualized-fee it becomes an investment product instead of what we have now which a āsignal service, not to be construed as individual investment advice or an investment product!ā.
I think where the regulations date themselves is that they generally assume custodianship of assets, which is not the case here, the client can decide whether or not to take a signal, and whether or not to stop or start or take their money out of their account whenever they like. This is to me a major advantage of c2 and eliminates a huge amount of the risk investing in hedge funds and the like, where regardless of strategy there is always the possibility you never see your money again, or it is locked up for so long with the manager doing who knows what. The transparency here is a major advantage if leveraged correctlyā¦
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