Hi Matthew!
An error on C2’s part has caused a bad fill this morning at a wrong time on a GBP/USD trade. The correct limit price that was inputed (1.6356) was no where close to where the market was when the order filled at 3:08 AM ET. One of the auto traders was filled at market at this time , while the rest of the auto traders were filled only 14 minutes later! weird action.
The auto fill price change e-mail from Collective2 AutoTrade Management states a fill change as follows:
Previous: BTO GBPUSD - Filled at 0
New: BTO GBPUSD - Filled at 1.640170
So it looks like your data feed marked the pair going down to zero for some reason, and immediately filled the order.
As you can see, the actual market would have filled the order limit only at approximately 3:50 AM ET, and subsequently rose to the STC limit.
I submitted a trouble ticket form but haven’t heard anything as of yet.[LINKSYSTEM_54341337]
Ofer -
There really isn’t anything that we can correct here.
Here’s a brief summary of this issue. At 3:08 AM ET, one of our broker partners widened their spread to 1.64024/1.63.
This ask triggered a conversion on your Buy Limit 1.6356. This means that all C2 accounts were filled at the prevailing market prices at their respective brokers. C2 then changed the fill price in your Model Account trading record to reflect the average price received by all your real autotraders.
It turns out that none of your subscribers filled at the limit price you desired. But they filled at the prevailing market price at the time that the spread widened at a C2-broker.
While this doesn’t happen often, it does happen on occasion, and we all must live with it. The price currently in your trading record does reflect the real fill price received by your subscribers and thus cannot be changed.
Matthew
"At 3:08 AM ET, one of our broker partners widened their spread to 1.64024/1.63.
This ask triggered a conversion on your Buy Limit 1.6356."
Matthew, I’m with Ofer here. That sounds very strange to me. The only quote that matters on a buy limit order is the offer. The bid and (what C2 appears to use) the midpoint between the bid and offer are irrelevant. The limit order shouldn’t have been converted to a market order unless the offer touched the limit price of 1.6356.
I would think that for a BUY order, the ask is what triggers conversion. That is, if someone is asking for a price that is less than what you (the buyer) is willing to pay, that will trigger conversion.
All that being said, it does seem suspicious to be that the bid ask was 1.64/1.63 – that pretty surely indicates a bad quote.
In any case, there are two different issues that we need to treat separately: 1) Why the limit was filled (answer: bid/ask at a broker), and 2) What we can do about a limit that was filled (answer: nothing, since real-life subscribers filled it; we changed our fill price to match theirs).
I’ll look into the quote a bit more, just to see whether we should have filtered it as a bad tick.
MK
Oh, okay. So you’re saying the ask (offer) was 1.63 and the bid was 1.64? I can see how that would muck things up.
Matthew,
I seriously don’t understand why a clear error made by one of your broker partners (a bad quote as you have obviously concluded) should reflect badly on my system’s record which I work hard on and develop for months now.
A few days ago you responded favorably to a request to correct an error clearly made by the trader’s own negligence - so I think this issue really “cries out” for intervention.
A future potential subscriber will not know from my system’s statistics that a bad quote is the reason why I had a lower return at a certain month, or why my draw down is larger than what it should be.
The record is the showcase window for the developers. We should bite the bullet when we make mistakes, but not when the mistakes are C2’s fault (or your broker’s, by extension).
At the very least, you should mark such trades clearly with an asterisk and tag them with a special color or such, so as to indicate in a visible manner on the system page that particular trades like this one are not the result of the handling of the system developer.
There was no “clear error” here, Ofer. We saw a bid/ask that triggered your limit order. We filled the order on your Model Account due to a bid/ask posted by a legitimate broker that our customers use. It turned out that the bid/ask posted by the broker probably wasn’t real (or wasn’t real for very long) but that’s an aside. The crux of the matter is that a bid/ask triggered your limit, and thus we converted your limit to treat it as filled.
It ain’t worth having a fit over. You’re sad the broker posted an Ask you don’t like? I’m sad too. But, that’s life, and that’s trading, and I think it’s probably time to move on.
I just followed up with Ofer and with Francis. We’ll look into doing a sanity check on bid/asks such that bids > asks will be treated as suspect.
MK
