Or at minimum, clearly label that only domestic vendors use this feature.
It is patently unfair.
"Question #1—To participate in this program, do I have to sign up to autotrade my own system, pay the subscription fee to myself and C2 keeps 30% of that amount? If so, that is an added expense and I object to that. "
Cheetah, agreed. This is nothing but a price increase. They can put lipstick on the pig and talk about the glossy lips. It’s still a pig of a price increase. fee-bay increased prices and over time, people have found tons of better venues for selling online.
Theta research charges $150/yr annually and timertrac charges $179/yr. C2 used to charge $196/yr and will now charge:
$304/yr if $30 monthly subscription
$556/yr if $100 monthly subscription
$1,996/yr if $500 monthly subscription
Does C2 provide enough value to command a 1200% premium above their competitors? Problem solved if they simply give vendors one “free” signup for their own use. And “free” is in quotes because we’re already paying our membership fee.
Timertrac is free to vendors. but it really only does indexes
Theta Research is almost dead.
You can AutoTrade your system without subscribing to it, and without paying 30% fees to C2.
Ross Theata Research is the premiere signal tracking web site. All of the big hedge fund money goes to Theata Research to look for and hook up with signal producers.
Rick Haines
How can a vendor autotrade their own system and not subscribe to it and not pay the 30% fee?
Simply click the AUTOTRADE button. Or go to the SETUP AUTOTRADING link on the left-side menu bar. All your systems will appear automatically, even if you do not subscribe to them.
Well this changes my opinion about the new feature 180 degrees. I’m in favor 100%. Sure enough, my system is listed there. So I assume that if I linked to an OptionsExpress or similar account, C2 would not try to bill me for my own system.
Maybe it’s just me and a couple other people here who were unclear about this. On the Information --> Pricing page where C2 describes vendor fees, could C2 outline what is and is not included in the vendor fee. For example, if I knew “Free auto-trading access to your own system” was a benefit, I would’ve started auto-trading a long time ago.
But if I trade with InteractiveBrokers, then I would need to pay a $35 monthly fee to TradeBullet?
Yes, if you use TradeBullet, you will pay a monthly fee to that company. (The money does not go to Collective2.)
If this cost is an issue, you can use a competitive product, Trader68, which is currently free. Both products support Interactive Brokers.
Also, optionsXpress Gen 3 AutoTrading is currently free, while it is in the beta test period. Presumably optionsXpress will add an AutoTrade fee at some point, but I do not speak for them, and do not know when.
It would be nice if TradeBullet would not charge a fee to those vendors who are auto trading their own system. After all, these vendors would only use TradeBullet for the purpose of promoting their system/raising their credibility on C2. I.e. they don’t need the TradeBullet functionality and without the new C2 feature as announced in this thread, they would not consider becoming TradeBullet customers either.
To further clarify: For Kauai, Trader68 and OptionXpress would not be feasible alternatives: Trader68 does not support options and the OptionXpress $12.95 per trade commission compares unfavorably to Interactive Broker’s $1 for a typical Kauai trade.
"After all, these vendors would only use TradeBullet for the purpose of promoting their system/raising their credibility on C2."
I think I disagree with you on this one, ST. If the vendor was autotrading for the benefit of poor children in Africa, that would be a reason to waive the fee. In the way you describe it, the vendor autotrades to promote his business and solely for his own benefit. In my opinion it is fair to pay something for this.
It is somewhat unfortunate though if the choice for some instruments forces you to spend more on this than other instruments, for a reason that is quite arbitrary.
Matt-
First of all, thanks for this idea… I am happy about it since I have been autotrading my own system for some time now.
UNFORTUNATELY, we only have one choice to autotrade options generation 2 or 3- OptionsXpress which is a TOTAL rip-off and charges way too much for their commissions. Luckily, I am able to trade a large enough figure where the commissions doesn’t eat too much into my profits. -But that limits my potential subscriber base, as you can’t autotrade my options system with just a couple thousand dollars due to the outragous commission struction there.
Are you working on getting Think or Swim on board? (they have a pick your own commission plan that can be considerably less than OptionsXpress). How about some of the other discount options brokers?
David, we are in discussions with several new brokers in order to make them C2-Compatible. Some of these firms have very attractive commission plans.
Think Or Swim is not one of these firms, however. I have approached them several times, and they have expressed little interest in working with C2. (Their general answer was that they had a lot of important projects in the works, and this wasn’t one of them.) If you are a customer of Think Or Swim (or any other broker, for that matter), and you want to see it become C2 compatible, the only thing I can think to suggest is to write them a brief (and polite) letter saying that you are a user of both companies’ services, and you would love to see the two firms work together. It’s a long shot, but you never know. Sometimes these sorts of messages get read by the right people, and acted upon.
In the meantime, of course C2 will continue its own evangelism efforts.
Matthew:
I suggest you contact these:
Striker Securities.
Robbins
Both stake their claim to systems trading.
It would be ESPECIALLY nice if you could land InteractiveBrokers. They trade everything (one account), and half of all serious traders seem to have an account with them (based on elitetrader polls and results)
The etrades and thinkorswim’s of the world will slowly disappear if they don’t support this and other systems. I’m in the process of closing my etrade account for that very reason.
And for what it’s worth, I did not open a thinkorswim account, despite their high ratings, because they were not C2 compatible. Their loss.
Proposed feature will not make credibility of whole Collective2 higher, but lower.
What will prevent some vendors from creating a piece of software, which will be connected to TradeBullet, TWS, MBT Navigator, and so on, via their APIs and will report trades to Collective2 server how a vendor will like?
It is only a matter of time and a degree of motivation, when such software will be created.
I opened C2 ATI manual and I see on page 3: It is up to your client to decide when to report fill information to the C2 server. (Explanatory note: In the C2 ATI manual a "client" is a software connecting Collective2 server and a broker.)
Well, this is an invitation to clever hackers. It is an intellectual challenge for inquisitive people. May be I will also try to write such software. I am a curious man. It will be interesting and fun. Of course, I will not use it, but I will publish it. Just as vulnerabilities in other software are reported, because this will be a vulnerability of C2.
As Ross wrote:
(See http://www.collective2.com/cgi-perl/board.mpl?want=listmsgs&boardid=30388564&threadhilite=5437)
There have been many known cases of people cheating C2, and Matthew having to patch holes of people who found ways to hack around the functionality.
I think, that Matthew is opening doors for conscienceless people to cheat C2 system.
No subscriber will be sure, if particular vendor uses a fake software or not.
Credibility of whole Collective2 will be undermined and this feature will have to be removed.
By the way Matthew: How do you recognize, if a vendor is auto-trading his/her system on some sort of demo account or automated paper-trading?
Interesting point. However, this possibility of fraud is not created by the plan. Vendors already have the possibility to autotrade their own system and to use their own software. The plan only adds to this that the vendor can volunteer to let C2 publicly confirm the fact that he or she autotrades.
I think your point applies only to Gen 1 autotrading. What you are saying is, if I understand you, that the vendor might write a code to wait several hours affer a signal, then pick with hindsight the best price within this timeframe, and report this as his fill with a large scale factor. The question is whether C2 has software in place to detect or prevent such anomalies. Probably not. It may be a good idea then to exclude the vendor’s fills from the autotrade and slippage statistics if he uses Gen 1.
Another possibility would be to accept only third party software like Tradebullet, and require some kind of authentication from the software.
…vendor might write a code to wait several hours after a signal, then pick with hindsight the best price within this timeframe, and report this as his fill…
I do not know, how it will be possible to exploit such backdoor to C2.
Possibilities may be limitless.
Rather I want to support this opinion:
I’m certain the new user interface will have a big red X that says whether vendors are investing in their own systems or not.
Thus, we will all be forced to either succumb to this marketing ploy or suffer from poor messaging.
And I want to show, that proposed feature will not ensure, what Mathew thinks:
We think it is important for system vendors to have “skin in the game” when offering systems to the public.
If a vendor will create such code, he can pretend, that he is trading his/her system on his/her real account, but in reality, he does not.
