Hi everyone,
My system "Aristoteles Premium" was in both the Hot Futures Systems and the Hot Systems pages of c2,…until I rescaled it today.
After rescaling,it,the system disappeared from the featured Hot Systems.
Anyone knows something about that?
Before rescaling I read the terms carefully and it is clearly stated that the stats will not change.What changed though is the realism factor,which turned to 0 from 99-100% that it used to be.This,I believe is not fair,because a developer will either have to stick with excess equity which will not allow Auto Traders to follow easily,or will have to suffer a (temporary I believe) "downgrade" of the system in the eyes of visitors.Your thoughts will be welcome.
I don’t understand why an autotrader can’t scale the system for themselves. It is nice to see a system at it’s 1x scale on C2. The 1x scale being a representative minimum (1 for futures and would need to be defined for stocks and forex), but I can just as easily trade a system at 50% or 25% etc.
As long as the vendor is not all over the place with leverage and position sizing, it is easy to trade a system at any scale.
Jim
I agree it is nice to see the system’s performance at its 1X scale,but with futures the things are a bit more complicated.Let me give you examples:
Assume a system starts with 100k equity and (according to the algorithm) has to trade 10 ES, or 5 CL, or 5 NG,or 5 GC ,or 3 XG (DAX).
An autotrader (60%) should trade 6-3-3-3 and (?) Dax.OK, let’s say 2 XG, and he will be overweight in Dax.
How should an autotrader at 30% trade? He would have to guess where to be overweight,and where underweight.
So, the subscriber decides on a x% scenario, and,when the account balance is higher,he either has to change allocations, or has to withdraw excess funds from the account.
Should he change (increase) the number of contracts for specific symbols, he is changing the percentage of exposure (in comparison with the trades so far), so he will be either over or under-performing the system’s c2 equity curve.Only if he trades at 1X scale, he can always stay “proportional”.
I understand that the c2 subscribers are allocating funds amongst different systems and I deem it advisable to “withdraw” profits from the model account and keep trading the same size of contracts.
This way, we all avoid adjustment headaches.
I don’t think that some vendors necessarily grasp this any better than traders.
For futures, it could be done by margin. The exchanges generally charge a margin that reflects contract value and current market risk for each instrument.
Stocks can also be as bad or worse. Google > $500, I think. And there are stocks for $2.
For any system, the vendor should define a minimum scale, I call this the 1x, it could be that the 1x scale is based on 100% account value or for futures it is the minimum number of contracts that can be traded to the make the system work.
If you average down 3 times before taking a loss, then maybe 1, 2, 4 contracts, or a total of 7. The 2x scale would simply be 2, 4, 8.
As long as a vendor trades the system at multiples of 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, etc. Then a subscriber can be sure to trade the system right, by simply using the scale feature at C2.
What is difficult is to try and trade at 1.5x or 2.3x, I would suggest that each vendor keep their trading with respect to position size and margin very clearly defined and give plenty of notice before a scale change.
Since as a vendor you are asking people to follow your advice, you need to communication clearly. Otherwise, I personally can’t autotrade a system that is all over the map.
Jim
Hi james,
trading at multiples of the scale is obviously not a problem.Increments though, may be of a problem to subscribers.Of course, I always communicate with subs and clarify things.The 100k of equity corresponds to 5 CL,5 NG,5 GC, 10 ES and 3 XG (Dax).
So, each time equity increases by 20%, I prefer to rescale and continue with the same number of contracts.Actually this saves a lot of trouble from the subscribers.Otherwise, I would have to increase size by 20% and, this would be causing them a headache.
