Number of contracts

Hello,



as a (future) provider of signals, can we limit the number of contracts a subscriber is allowed to trade ( otherwise one subscriber can use my tradelimit of 500 contracts S&P for a single monthly payment…

Unfortunately, and to the best of my knowledge, there is no mechanism to control subscriber volume. Thus, on reasonably priced, profitable systems, large size traders can get a real bargain.

Thanks Axel,



this doesn’t need a lot of thought from my side. It means i won’t start ‘selling’ my tradingssignals on Collective2.

The system of unlimited contracts can have adverse effects on the profitability if the demand is higher than the book ‘bids’. Besides that it would be grossly unfair to the developer.

Hopefully this will be become an agenda point for the board and evaluate if this needs to be changed.

Can we see how many contracts one is trading with. An alternative would be to personally mail him and order him to limit his size or he would be disabled ( if that’s somehing we can do offcourse)



Looking forward to your reply.



regards,



rob

I have voiced concern to my subscribers about this very topic. Not about what’s fair to me as a developer, but system deterioration through slippage. I have asked new subscribers what their intent is with respect the number of contracts traded and all of them have offered to limit the number. Of course, you have the option to unsubscribe anyone, but the challenge is to learn who the whales are. The live trades ledger only shows brokers and volume, not the user.



Axel,



thanks for your reply. This dialog with the subscribers could work out initially. I wouldn’t start with 500 subscribers in the first week anyway… :slight_smile:



rgds,



rob

Rob,



I had thought about this a good bit as well before bringing one of my systems to collective2. I ended up deciding to bring a strategy that requires a higher minimum and goes for larger targets to trade than one of my better strategies which is an intraday scalping strategy where too much slippage could possibly dramatically reduce the results. The drawback is that I’ll probably never have many subscribers. Like you I also feared one trader on a strategy with a small minimum could hog the ‘bandwidth’ of the number of contracts a system can trade without a great deal of slippage.

Axel brought up a good point with the live trade ledger. It would be nice for a system developer to have access to the names of who is trading what. This way a developer can set their own limit of contracts per subscription and then police it themselves using the unsubscribe button. Of course this only works if the system lends itself only to auto trading instead of manually entering in the orders.

Overall though I’ve had good experiences on collective2 with communication and cooperation with subscribers and developers alike and wouldn’t hesitate to bring a system on board. Worst case you just shut it down and keep trading it for yourself.



Cheers,



Bryan