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is not indicative of future performance or success.
There is a substantial risk of loss in trading. You should therefore carefully consider
whether such trading is suitable for you in light of your financial condition. You should read,
understand, and consider the Risk Disclosure Statement that is provided by your broker
before you consider trading. Most people who trade lose money.
This is a wonderful site that gives a chance for investors to make serious money, but from what I’ve read here, nonetheless, many don’t.
As I see it, there are three issues in growing C2:
How to market C2 better to the outside world.
How to market C2 better to people already on the site.
How to make investing more profitable for investors (and for strategy providers as well).
I know nothing about marketing or about the legality or wisdom of marketing proposals made in this thread.
IMO, the biggest issue is how to increase the likelihood that investors make excellent returns on C2. Personally, I think it would be good if C2 analyzed its data to see which criteria predicted future strategy survival and future investment profits. And then C2 could use that info to come up with a better C2 score that would increase the chances that investors profit here. And add the best criteria to the Leaderboard. And use that info to drive the performance of ScoutAlpha or its advisor business.
If investors at C2 made more money, that would help solve a lot of problems.
I believe that it can be easily done right now without any additional C2 actions. Trade leaders can easily change their fees up or down depending on the results at any period. Unfortunately I didn’t see a lot of them doing this. Correctly said, I’ve seen only increase of the fees, nobody drop them down due to bad months.
Something tells me that an incentive fee will be just added on top of the regular C2 fee.
Or at least support the brokers that are listed as being compatible. I spent the last 2 weeks closing a Tradestation account, researching systems at C2, opening an account at Ally (stocks/options) because it is listed as a compatible broker, only to find out this morning as I tried to set up autotrading for a system that Ally is NOT actually supported. So huge waste of time and effort to change brokers, mutiple wire fees, etc. based on a compatible broker list that isn’t even legitimate.
Yes, and it isn’t like the compatible broker list is some insignificant fluff feature that has no consequence if it doesn’t work. Autotrading is the heart of what C2 stands for, and it requires interfaces to broker accounts to function at all. So it is very surprising that maintaining that list isn’t absolute top priority so that people don’t go through the hassle of opening or transferring accounts as I did, only to find out the supposedly supported broker is actually not supported! The result for me is 4-5 strategies I would absolutely have subscribed to, but won’t now.
Just a public service message for anyone thinking about opening an account at Ally. C2 still show them as a compatible broker when they are not, and I wired $100K in to open an account there on Monday of this week (it is Wed. pm as I type this) because of the C2 compatible broker list. I sent in a wire request today to Ally to get my funds wired back into my checking account, and was told that there is a 60 day hold on deposits and I won’t be able to get the money back until that time period is over (they claim it is some anti money laundering law … anyone ever heard of this?). So the C2 error of listing Ally as a compatible broker not only resulted in the wasted time to set up an account and wire money in, and loss of ability to autotrade stock/option strategies without finding another broker, I’ve also lost access to the money for 60 days as well. So the consequences of this error were significant, and Ally is still shown as a compatible broker at C2.
Speaking of Ally specifically, stay away from them at all costs. When I contacted them about autotrading they seemed very happy to tell me that they don’t support any third party application of any kind (as if this were a plus for doing business with them). And the rudeness of the person I was transferred to to ask questions about this 60 day law for returning funds was unbelievable … he was very happy to tell me to get lost well before anything unpolite was said on my part. Just a horrible company and if I can prevent even one person from thinking of doing any business with those guys it would be a good thing.
C2 have acknowledged that they aren’t compatible with Ally, but for some reason still keep them on their compatible broker list which seems very strange when you are in the business of offering autotrading that requires an interface to the broker being used. One response from C2 commented that “those darn brokers” are always buying each other and it is hard to keep up with things, but that is hardly a reason to willy nilly list a broker as compatible and have potential customers create accounts, fund them, etc. and then not be able to participate. And the loss of access to significant sums of money for 60 days is not just a minor inconvenience. So I can’t understand the rationalle for keeping a broker on the compatible broker’s list for even one second once it is known that they are actually not compatible (and C2 should constantly keep track of this anyway, for obvious reasons).
If this 60 day rule is a legitimate law then I suppose Ally is not doing anything illegal, but how could it possibly take 60 days (!) to work out a money laundering situation. Typical government inefficiency I suppose, but in my case I would have never had to endure this hassle if the C2 compatible broker list was actually correct … and it is very puzzling why they have not removed Ally already. It can’t be that hard to edit a web page to correct such a colossal blunder.
I’m sorry that we listed Ally as a broker on the C2 web site.
A few months ago, putting Ally’s logo on our web site kinda, sorta made sense… that is, back when MB Trading (who had worked with C2 happily for so many years) was bought by Ally. We liked the idea that an large financial firm now owned a company that had worked with C2… and so, without enough careful thought, we changed the logo on our web page from “MB Trading” to “Ally.”
In hindsight, this wasn’t the right thing to do. It turns out that the “MB Trading” brand is being phased out at Ally; and, more important, that Ally is not interested in working with new technology partners (like C2). We will remove the “Ally” logo from the web site, to make sure that no one else is led to open an account at Ally with the hope of using C2 AutoTrade technology.
Randy, I apologize for the incorrect information on our web site. We screwed up. I’m sorry.
What broker would you recommend then for stocks/options trading via C2 and autotrade? After dealing with Ally I fully agree that they are not “normal” (I had an inactive Tradeking account so thought it would be easy to just activate that which is the only reason I chose them), but it appears IB is about the only viable option to work with C2.
I had an account with IB 10-12 years ago and the customer service was awful (and from reading reviews more recently that still seems to be the case), and back then just logging in was a hassle. Some physical device was sent that generated numbers every few seconds and that had to be used to enter the numeric value as part of the login process. But maybe that has been eliminated now and the process is simpler. Is IB the universal choice around here for a C2-compatible broker?
Thanks Matthew … I see that it Ally been removed now. I decided to vent a little on the forum because it did create a significant hassle with the wires, etc., but the larger hit is the loss of about $1350 in option writing income I would have made if that $100K was available for my usual naked put writing over the next 60 days. I’ve only been able to average about 8%/year doing that which is one reason I wanted to try some strategies here at C2 to see if I could improve on that. So overall this episode cost me about $1450 in real money, and making enough noise to get Ally removed from the compatible broker list will hopefully eliminate the chance of someone else having this same experience.
For C2 strategies I’m using IB many years. Myself I don’t remember when I had to talk to IB customer service last time. Basically you can achieve everything using their web pages (account management, help, tools). TWS is helpful to monitor real-time account positions. Universal account (trade everything from one account) is very nice feature. I’m passive C2 customer (I did decide not trade actively myself long time ago) and I don’t need 3rd party tools for charting/trading. From my point of view IB is perfect for me, cost effective, allows me subscribe to C2 stocks, futures, options and forex strategies. And IB is biggest C2 customer from brokerage pool (most likely IB will not duplicate Ally situation).
