Quote from anvil993:
Jsmith,
I trade 10-20 names long and 10-20 names short in a market neutral strategy.
I have used Anvil at Assent, Laser at Genesis, RealTic and Redi+ at Bear Stearns before Goldman purchased them.
I am at a prop firm, and like most their platforms are circa 1998, buy/sell/short.
I am trying to implement a more mechanical exit strategy, one to eliminate emotion causing me to override the basket, and two to allow me to better manage numerous open positions.
A few programmers I've spoken to seem to focus on applications for IB's TWS.
FWIW, I use Pacmid Technologies Blackwood platform, I am hoping the time and effort to develop a OCO capability for Blackwood will be worth it.
My other option is to move to IB and use the third party basket trading products. That means limiting myself to 4:1, dealing with tokens, and spending a half day on hold speak to someone.
The quest continues...
Since MOC's cannot be cancelled in the last 20 minutes,the way I see it you have 2 options:
1) get rid of your stop before the MOC deadline. This essentially makes you "unprotected" into the close.
2) instead of an MOC order use a market order with a "good after time" setting. These are highly reliable to the second. I probably do 50+ GAT's / day. The drawback to this case is you aren't getting the closing print if that's important to you.
If it were me, I'd take option 1, but I don't know your exact situation.