Can I clarify what these buttons do? I assume if you have a system that has 1 contract open, and you do -less, it will close the position, and if you do +more, it will add another contract.
I assumed it could do the same if you have 2 contracts open - ie +more will add ONE more contract. It appears to actually add one more POSITION - ie in this case 2 contracts.
Is there a reason for this? I was planning to double the amount I trade with a system that normally only trades a single contract (ie I will open with 2 contracts), and then use this feature to manage one of the contracts manually. But it seems the -less button is likely to close BOTH contracts, and thus take me out of the trade.
DOH. Note to self, take 10 minutes to realx after working out, before hitting the screen.
Of course what I plan to do will work. I was just surprised when I did a +more on a system that had 2 contracts open, expecting stupidly to end up with 3 contracts open, whereas it seems fairly logical that it will in fact open more positions.
Would be worth making this clear for dummies like me though…
However, adding some more contracts hasn’t altered the stop. The stop order is still to close 2 positions, which will leave 2 open positions, presumably to be tidied up by the synchronization, perhaps some minutes later, at what price we don’t know.
Oh I don’t FSKING believe it.
+more means 1 more POSITION
-less means 1 less CONTRACT
???
Common guys sort this out, it’s bad enough having to use an iffy web interface to manually manage trades on the split second, but stuff like this costs us money.
No, Jack. The UI is meant to function as follows:
When you click the + button, a little input box appears (it was previously invisible) asking you how many units more to increase your position by (i.e. you can increase by any number you like).
Press the - button and a little input box appears asking how much of the current position you want to close.
If this behavior is not what you see, then let me know what browser you are using (version and OS, too, please). A screenshot of the offending section of the iffy web interface would help too. You can send this info via email to me at matthew at collective2.com
Thanks
Matthew, this is exactly what I see. The system in question is Have fun. It opened 2 contracts short RUK at 728. When the market moved against us and hit 736, I added to the position, by doing exactly as you say;
click +more
enter "1" into the box
click "submit" or something similar.
That actually added 2 contracts to my position, ie it added 1 lot of whatever Have fun already had, ie 2 contracts.
When the price retraced back to 730ish, I closed my part of the position (2 contracts), by doing the same, with the -less button, ie
click -less
enter "1"
click "submit.
This only closed 1 contract, not 2.
I had to go back and close the second of my extra contracts by repeating this; at a less advantageous price.
BTW, I was happy to averqage down here, because Have Fun had a stop at 738, so I was effectively risking only a couple of points for my exttra contracts.
However, I noticed that the stop order at OEC was still for 2 contracts, even after I added 2 more (4 contracts in total). ie the stop order didn’t get updated with the +more action.
OK. I’ll take a look at the audit trail and see what happened.
Matthew, I’ve just done the exact same thing to scalp another point off our position in Have Fun.
I did +more, with a quantity of “1”. That added 2 contracts to the position for a total of 4.
I then did a -less, and this time entered “2” as the quantity. Sure enough, this closed 2 contracts.
So +more and -less must be using different logic, or getting a rounding error, or something.
This is very helpful info. Thank you. I’ll keep you posted as we investigate.
