I am new to C2, and am looking forward to releasing my algorithm here shortly. I realize there is a previous post on this however the problem was never addressed rather people started arguing about different things. However, I have been confused about the popularity stats. What is the popularity stats actually telling us? If we aren’t privy to how many subscribers are actually out there how do we know that there are even enough to make paying for C2 worth it? Is that why we aren’t privy? From what I read in the last post there are for more algos with 0 subscribers. I feel like I am going into C2 totally blind, and likely to lose money because of all the questions surrounding the subscriber side of C2. I have a great algo that made close to 600% last year however am considering not using C2 because of this. Please advise!
Hi, Timothy:
I understand why you want to know the specific number of subscribers per strategy.
We made a decision a while back to no longer release those numbers. (We used to.) There are a couple of reasons for this decision. One important reason is that it creates self-fulfilling prophecies, or, more technically speaking, feedback loops: popular systems grow more popular, at the cost of leaving “hidden gems” undiscovered. This is not only bad for strategy owners and subscribers, but also bad generally for C2’s business model. We want a lot of strategy owners to be successful, not just a handful.
I think your real concern is to make sure that you - as a strategy manager - can make money on C2. The answer is: Yes, you can. While we don’t release highly specific numbers, we do release useful aggregate numbers, which I believe support this claim. See this page, for example, to see a real-time chart showing total lifetime earnings of top strategy owners on C2:
https://www.collective2.com/aboutStartSystem
I know this isn’t exactly the information you want, nor does it contain the level of detail you desire. But I hope it helps reassure you that good strategy managers do in fact make good money at C2. Of course you need a good strategy, and you need to build at least something of a track record. It would be unrealistic to assume people will subscribe to a brand-new strategy without any sort of performance behind it.
Matthew
Hello Matthew:
You have post a link to total lifetime earnings. Do you have monthly earnings about some strategies? It´s very difficult to know how many time is that money done. Can they earn $500.000 in 7 years or 1 year or 1 month?.
Lifetime earnings is not very clear to see if it is worth start a strategy in C2. I understand what you say about the cost of leaving “hidden gems” undiscovered and I agree with that.
Can you tell us what is the earning monthly average of strategy owners on C2.
Thanks in advantage.
MK,
Thank you for the quick reply. I have to agree David, showing only the top lifetime earnings still makes it hard to gauge what kind of subscriber base C2 has right now. The 86,000 number provided in the link only says registered users. How many have subscribed before, how many users are considered inactive.
I like the idea of trying to give every strategy a shot, however its seems like there are ways of being transparent about the subscriber base without saying strategy ABC makes $x per month because they have x subscribers. One would think showing the overall potential market to potential managers should even be a selling point.
Don’t get me wrong though. I love the website, I love the idea, and I love the opportunity C2 brings to public traders, coders, and investors. I just feel like there is a need for more information and transparency on the subject before I spend hundreds building the stats over time once I bring my algorithm in, then hundreds more potentially waiting for subscribers. Although I am confident there are a couple of subscribers out there who will like my strategy well enough to cover my costs of listing it I was just surprised, and thought this was a subject that should be brought up again.
I would greatly appreciate any more information you’re willing to share. I would feel more confident and reassured having it and I am sure a lot of other potential strategy managers would as well as the current information can be a little misleading and absent. Also, thank you for hearing this potentially disagreeable post out!
I understank Mr. Klein policy of not releasing subscribers numbers, however for new developers will be important to know some statistics. In my opinion, it will be of use to release some aggregated statistics, without indicating precise strategy names and subscribers numbers,but something more detailed that the page at the link provided by Mr. Klein.
Thanks to C2 long history, may be also considered releasing numbers about old strategies that had their best days some years ago… 
Thanks for any contribute
I think one can come up with a pretty reasonable estimate for the number of subscribers for a particular system by viewing the autotrade data for some of the recent trades. Sometimes the trades are split into multiple transactions, so it is not necessarily one subscriber per line, but it gets you in the ballpark.
Gary
Timothy,
I have been a C2 member since 2012 and, as an active system subscriber, I can assure you a consistent system with a track record of good returns, reasonable drawdowns, and sensible subscription fees will have no problem attracting and retaining subscribers.
As mentioned previously by Gary Lynn, it is relatively easy to get an estimate of subs for many systems by looking at their auto trade stats, over a number of trades, and I think this is especially true and accurate for futures systems or for systems where the trading style or timing of trades dictates the necessity of auto trading.
It seems to me that decent income for developers is generated quite often.
Corey
You can get number of subscribers for each system using C2 data api. It returns max number and current number.
Really, what C2DS command is that? The getsystemstats doesn’t provide that information.
getsystemstats returns xml formatted data with fields ‘numsubsall’ and ‘numsubsnow’.
No numsubsall or numsubsnow when I try it:
wget ‘https://data.collective2.com/cgi-perl/xml.mpl?cmd=getsystemstats&session=MY_SESSION_ID_REMOVED&systemid=95867191’ -q -O - |grep num
numPosLosers
numPosWinners
numsigs_all
numsigs_forex
numsigs_futures
numsigs_options
numsigs_stocks
numtrades
numtrades
numwins
numloss
Note all the above are wrapped in ‘name’ elements in the XML as returned by getsystemstats but, the software for making posts removes it (presumably a security measure). So, I am getting back XML from this call, but none of the fields are numsubsall or numsubsnow
Heh. I was able to get these data on November 17, and I’ve tried to do it now. You right (unfortunately), no subscriber data exist in results, sorry for confusion. Looks like Mr @MatthewKlein recently removed number of subscribers from C2 data.
Sorry, gentlemen. I didn’t mean to be silent or mysterious about this. I have removed this data from the XML API. It’s not meant for public use at this time, for the reasons discussed elsewhere.
There is a way you can figure out the number of subscribers of a system, but I am not telling, not even to Matt… 
Hint: It is not a programming trick…
The suggestion here is to atleast make this info available to system developers , this is important for developers , technically there could be 700 systems competing over few subscribers , also to see where is the interest - whether it is short term long term stocks futures … etc - , and to know when exactly subscribers leave systems .
By just showing the data to system developers it eases the concerns re the “self fulfilling” issues … etc . Otherwise the only reason could be that the systems:subs ratio is very high and just handful of systems have subscribers and thus making the data private is for C2 best interest so it doesn’t lose developers - the main income for C2 - .
I am not criticizing C2 i think it is a great website and has a future , but system developers’ needs shouldn’t be ignored , for god sake its like fishing in the dark for us its not easy and its time consuming , trying to blindly meet the subs needs is even harder than being profitable .
Saying that you should have a good system to get subscribers is vague , what good system means ? I am sure there are tons of good systems here without a single subscriber , its all about supply and demand , subs have certain demands and these demands should be known to developers by making the number of followers data available to us .
Note : A well known website for forex signals is showing this data publicly .
On C2 you must have system which made 100% profit per half year with 15% DD and win ratio about 90%, then you get subscribers
A system like that people love, but it’s also a system likely to lose you money. That’s the problem, people don’t know how to evaluate systems so they lose money and who will stick around if they lose money?
People love fast profit systems, but system which make fast profit work’s only in short period.
“…but system which make fast profit work’s only in short period.”
For the record; I disagree. 
Hopefully your system will still be on the leaderboard in 2 or 3 years… but honestly C2 has been around for over a decade and it’s pretty rare for a high return system to keep running for that long.
