We’ve received some feedback from our AutoTrade broker partners that some system vendors are entering literally hundreds of simultaneously working stops and limits on the same symbol. This is a fairly serious no-no, and many exchanges and brokers do not allow placement of more than one stop or limit per symbol and per side of the market price.
For example, if IBM is trading at 100, feel free to go ahead and enter
BUY TO OPEN IBM @ limit 99
and also SELL SHORT IBM at limit 101
…but that’s generally where most brokers draw the line. At C2, the placing of dozens of orders on each side of the market for a single symbol causes problems in two ways:
a) It makes our broker partners upset
b) it drains CPU resources from C2, thus causing the site to slow for other users
Thus, starting this afternoon, we’re going to be placing restrictions on the number of simultaneous stops and limits you can have working on any single symbol: that number is 4 – i.e. 4 stops per symbol and 4 limits.
As soon as any of your stop or limits get filled, cancelled, or expired, you can enter more orders.
Most users won’t even notice this restriction, but a few will (those placing hundreds of limits and stops per symbol!)
Since these customers are using the API to place these orders, I suggest you rework your software to hold orders locally on your own computer and release them as C2’s stops and limits get filled or cancelled.
I’m not trying to punish you; if this restriction will cause you problems, please contact me to ask for a grace period in which you will be able to rework your automated software to meet these new requirements.
Matthew
Whoever is doing that has no real clue how to automate a system. God help them if they leave those orders overnight.
