this is my first trade using my “system” on C2…I trade options,am I forced to buy at the ask and sell at the bid on C2? Will I be able to buy and sell between the bid and ask when there are LARGE spreads?
thank you in advance
No you cant here at C2 .
But if there are autotraders following your system the final price will be the VWAP of the live autotrader’s fill prices.
I understand , but any limit order will be converted to a market order once its touched . You put a limit order here , C2 will send it as a market order to autotraders when it is activated . I myself have a good system for buying at the bid selling at the ask but it wont work here .
Assuming the broker’s risk system allows it, limit orders are sent as limits to the live Autotrading accounts. They only convert to market if someone fills somewhere, or if the quote feed trades at your limit price.
Can you or MK shed some light on here that’s important … not clear .
I think what Francis is saying is the following:
For option orders (and all instruments, in fact; but the context of this discussion thread is options trading), we do send limit orders to AutoTrader brokerage accounts as limit orders.
And so, in many cases, these will be filled at the limit for an AutoTrader. The issue is that – particularly in the case of thinly-traded options – liquidity in the market may not be huge, and so some AutoTraders will not be filled at the limit. In order to keep these traders’ accounts in sync with the strategy they are following, these traders will be filled at the market price instead.
Now, of course this degrades performance for those AutoTraders who weren’t the “lucky” ones to get filled at the limit price. But C2 does something nifty: it actually uses the real-life fills of all AutoTraders – both the lucky ones and unlucky ones – and changes the C2 track record (the Model Account) to reflect the volume-weighted-average-price (VWAP) of real-life AutoTraders. So, in fact, the C2 Model Account – while still hypothetical performance – does in fact incorporate AutoTrader’s real-life results into the track record. In other words, if the strategy has a tendency to “chase limits” in thinly-traded markets, the Model Account performance on C2 will ultimately reflect the fact that most traders are unlikely to get those optimal fills, because of lack of liquidity.
This is a slightly different issue than the original question, which was posted by @philip_linsky, which was:
[A]m I forced to buy at the ask and sell at the bid on C2? Will I be able to buy and sell between the bid and ask when there are LARGE spreads?
The answer is, you are not forced to do anything. But if you enter a MARKET order into C2, then you will buy at the ask and sell at the bid. You can certainly enter a LIMIT order into C2, in which case, the limit may fill at your limit, depending on market conditions.
Matthew
Thanks , Bottom line if the system doesn’t have autotraders then it only buys at the ask sells at the bid . However if it has autotraders then “some of them sometimes may” get filled at the limit order level but the unlucky will get their limit orders converted to market orders . Ofcourse system’s fills reflect the weighted average price the autotraders were filled at .
Yes that’s what I meant 
Thanks Matthew.
