Hi
I was autotrading AT Forex yesterday afternoon (16 August). According to my FXCM statement, he lost 54 pips on a trade at 3.44 pm. Then again at 4.32pm, he lost 19 pips. Yet neither of these trades appear in the closed positions on his C2 page. Why? This makes me nervous about whether the stats we see on Signallers are accurate.
Yet, I believe these losses appear in his graph which reflects a sharp downward trend - but nothing in the closed positions explains it. If I had not been in these positions myself, I would not have known about it.
Does it happen that C2 does not place some trades on Signaller pages?
Max:
Your AutoTrading account received perfect AutoTrading fills that exactly matched the C2 trading system. I think you may be confused because, on the C2 system page, C2 aggregates multi-leg trades into one line. (You can, at your leisure, “drill down” into a trade line to see each component of the trade.)
To specifically address your question, take a look on the AT Forex page at the trade line that opened its position yesterday, Aug 16, at 9:34 (all times Eastern). Hold your mouse over the BTO field, and a nifty little pop-up window will appear detailing all the legs of the complex, multi-legged trade. You’ll see that your real-life fill at 15:44 matches exactly with the fill reported in the pop-up window at 15:44.
You also asked about account activity that occurred at 4:32 pm. Actually, you shut down AutoTrading for that system at 4:32. When you do this, C2 closes your positions in your real-life brokerage account. Thus, you manually closed the trade at a loss, but that loss was not part of the system and does not appear on the C2 system page.
Many thanks Matthew. I did not know about the multitrade facility. Is there any literature on it around the C2 site? So in essence, that whole series of trades (excluding my shutdown) had a 0 pip net?
I still find that strange because when I emailed AT this morning, he said he had left a position open overnight (I could feel that coming, hence my shutdown) - and yet that loss is not reflected? Perhaps that was an FXCM problem ie. his order was not communicated to FXCM although C2 got it?
Max: a trade can start off as a loss and then wind up as a profit. So if the vendor leaves a losing trade open overnight, it can be closed at a profit the next day.
Again, no trades were missed. No trades failed to be communicated.
Thanks Matthew. One last question: on the 15th, AT Forex’s graph was rising with no dents. Today, it has a sharp downturn. Yet when you look at his trades over that period, there are only 2 small losses not big enough to cause the chart dip. What is the cause of this dip then please?
Max - I’m experiencing the sames issues: 1) The AT graph has a sharp down swing yet nearly all my recent closed trades are positive in FXCM, 2) when you turn on the C2 autotrade feature that turns the closed trades brown, most of the P/L columun zeros out for some reason. I think that’s a bug.
Hi Valerie, thanks. Yes, I work with a couple of others and they also noticed this.
Matthew said: "Max: a trade can start off as a loss and then wind up as a profit. So if the vendor leaves a losing trade open overnight, it can be closed at a profit the next day."
Matthew, I agree, but in this case, that would be impossible. AT Forex opened the GBP/USD positions between 6 am and 9am (ET) at around 1.9833 & 1.9860. The market only reached those levels again on the 17th around 7pm on Aug 17th long after his positions were closed. There should definitely be negative pips for this trade. In addition, the signaller wrote to me and agreed that this was a loss.
I now realise from Valerie’s post is that the probably error is that C2 has zero’d out those negatives rather than noting their proper negative values. These negative values are however reflected in the graph.
I do a lot of analysis on the data to choose signallers so it would be good to find out what went wrong here to prevent recurrence so that we can trust what we are analysing. Of course I am open to the idea that Valerie and I might be wrong re the graph downturn not correspending to the data, and anomoly I pointed out re the timing of his opening and closing position. But if I am, I’d like to understand how and why.
Best wishes
Max
Max:
I do not mean to be difficult, but at this point I’m not entirely sure what you are asking specifically. Once I learn your exact question, I will try my best to answer it.
Please let’s separate the issue from Valerie’s question. She is talking about something else entirely – a feature (still under development) which allows a C2 user to “overlay” their own private autotrade fills on top of system results. While I’m not 100% sure I know what you are asking, I’m pretty sure it is unrelated to this.
So then, let’s take a step back. Please ask your specific question one more time. Provide as many details as you can. Again, I will try my best to answer as accurately as possible.
If you prefer to take this conversation offline, and into private email, that’s fine too. It’s up to you. If so, my email is matthew at collective.com
MK
Whoops. Yes. matthew at collective2.com.
