I have subscribe RD30 Day Trading to autotrade in my OX account
number xxxx-8780.
After that then I subscribe BondPortfoli E9 to autotrade in my another
OX account number xxxx-8798.
Then I return to Autotrade page in Current Autotrade Permission table
, in Account column, in RD30 Day Trading System row, it had changed to
xxxx-8798,the same as BondPortfolio E9.
I tried to edit setup the RD30 account to xxxx-8780 but the
BondPortfolio account also became to xxxx-8780.
That made me frustrated. I unsubscribed RD30 and then edit setup to
change BondPortfolio account to be xxxx-8798.
How to resolve this bug?
Hi, Nattanant:
When we designed C2’s AutoTrade technology, we never thought a customer would want to trade two systems at the same broker, but using two completely different account numbers.
I know, I know – in hindsight, that seems absurd! But such is the nature of software design; you never really know how people will actually use the thing you build.
So, up until very recently, there was no simple way to do what you wanted to do – that is, to trade System A and System B in two different accounts at the same broker. (It is not a problem, and never has been a problem, to trade multiple systems in one single account; or to trade one system at Broker #1 and another system at Broker #2).
I am happy to announce that we now have a fairly painless workaround to this problem. We have set up a second server connection for optionsXpress. This allows you to trade one system at optionsXpress server #1 (to be traded in your first optionsXpress account) and another system at optionsXpress server #2 (to be traded in your second optionsXpress account). You’ll now see an option to select either server from the “optionsXpress” (OX) broker choice on the C2 AutoTrade Setup page. If you want to simultaneously trade two systems in two OX accounts, make sure you setup the first system at server #1 and the second system at server #2.
Customers who only want to use one optionsXpress account number don’t have to worry about this.
Nattanant,
I’d be cautious about autotrading with OptionsXpress.
I had a couple of incidents that cost me money when trades weren’t executed correctly. I won’t say the system name because it’s not the fault of the system developer but I want to say that it’s not a scalping system.
I closely monitored my account to see if any other errors occurred and last week my signal provider canceled an open order and OptionsXpress refused to cancel it so I had to go in there and cancel it manually.
I’m in Australia so this uncanceled order was open and ready to be filled until I checked my a/c when I got up in the morning. Had the order been filled and the market gone against me I could have been in deep doodoo.
As trading is about managing risk I decided OptionsXpress were too risky for me and I’ve since opened an OpenEcry account (which is ironic, since they are owned by OptionsXpress). Hopefully there won’t be any more incidents like the ones I have described with them.
I had very good experience with Open E Cry and very bad experience with OptionsXpress.
Karl, can you please clarify what you mean by “bad experience”? I remember you also mentioning it earlier this year in another post.
I ask because I auto-trade with OX. I too have had a couple of auto-trade problems very similar to what Daniel describes above. They were sorted out in the end, but not before I got in touch with OX and C2 tech support, and/or intervened manually in my OX trade screen.
The first time it happened, an erroneous close order was placed over the weekend because options symbolism had changed, so the auto-trade system got confused.
The second time, a limit order was cancelled in the C2 system and the corresponding order at OX was also duly cancelled as expected. But C2 auto-trade still thought that the order at OX was open and kept trying to cancel it again, which of course did not work as there was no open order to cancel! So this infinite loop arose during which time C2 auto-trade refused to place any more orders to open on that symbol.
I don’t know if these problems were due to bugs at the C2 or OX end.
I’d like the problems addressed by the developers… not to have to change broker! So far (about 6 years) I have been very happy with OX before I came to C2 but they need to take C2 auto-trading seriously for my satisfaction level to stay high!
Dean.
Dean,
I never traded a C2 option system with OX - actually I think those cause less problems than stock and futures systems - otherwise you would have quit OX a long time ago.
Just see the thread of today addressing the same issue as an example of problems you encounter there. With the C2 stock and futures systems I tried there I got bad fills and sometimes no fills at all. In addition, when I used systems which short stocks half of the time I got a message which seemed to come from OX but actually was sent by C2 saying that they did not have the stocks available. The frustrating thing was that when I called OX they often said they had the stocks available for shorting.
I think the main problem lies with the C2 interface to OX. At one time I traded one of OX’s own autotrading systems (it was an option system) and it worked without any problems.
Karl -
I recently posted a comment on some of the peculiarities of the optionsXpress API. See:
http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/board.mpl?want=listmsgs&boardid=9323885&threadhilite=8457
So I won’t repeat that content here, other than to say the following.
1) While I don’t agree with your opinion that “I think the main problem lies with the C2 interface to OX” (on the contrary, I think the problem lies solely with the optionsXpress (OX) API interface, period) – the issue is really moot. Customers don’t know or care why something doesn’t work the way they expect, and they don’t care whom to blame. They just want it to work. That’s why we are working closely with OX, reporting the peculiar issues we uncover in their API, and helping them work better with C2 AutoTrading. A lot of this is outside our hands, but it doesn’t mean we aren’t taking responsibility for making things better. Here’s the upshot: there are certain known issues that crop up when AutoTrading at OX. These are not frequent, but they do happen. OX will eventually resolve them. For most OX customers, they are minor enough that they are willing to put up with these infrequent issues. We continue to support AutoTrading at OX, and we will continue to support these customers. Those customers who want to use other brokers can, and we will have several new Gen3 brokers shortly.
2) Finally, I most certainly don’t agree with your insinuation that somehow C2 makes up imaginary lack of shortable stock inventory. We simply report to you what the broker tells us when we place a trade. When you consider how shorting really works at some brokers (there is literally a person at a desk who looks around for inventory of available shares to short), it seems perfectly reasonable that a broker might reject an automated request for shorting a stock, but then be able to perform the same shorting trade manually later. This is a limitation of the broker. As the ink-stained wretches in the newspaper business (used to?) say: “We just report the news. We don’t make it.”
Matthew,
As always I appreciate your fast response and I certainly do not want to insinuate that C2 makes up imaginary non shortable stock lists, all I did was to report my frustrating experience with OX.
I know you do your best to fix the problem and am looking forward to the day when users will come forward on this forum and tell that things at OX are finally working fine for stock, futures and option systems and that they have been using it for an extended period satisfactorily.
