Quote from rolextrader:
And if you look at enough of those subscriber trades, you will see different fills for seemingly the same trade.
As a result, those trades, too, must be viewed as hypothetical because there is no assurance they can be matched by another autotrading subscriber.
Not exactly. Those fills are the AVERAGED autotrade fills. Thus if a vendor has 5 subscribers, it shows a fill as all 5 subscribers fills averaged. This has 2 problems:
1. It slows down the feedback for the vendor on the fill, and even changes the value of it as the reports are coming back. So the vendor first sees a value close to what he saw on his broker's ticker, than a few minutes later that fill changes to the averaged subscriber fill. In a fast moving market the difference could be quite big and the vendor not even aware of the eventual filled price until it got corrected. Can take about 2-3 minutes.
2. More subscribers a vendor has, the bigger the chance that 1-2 of them have a slow broker and inadequate fill, thus screwing up the average on the fill.
Also according to Matthew if a system has an autotrader, than those trades are displayed on the system's mainpage, which is unfortunate. This way one can not compare theoretical and real fills. The main page should only show theoretical fills by the C2 engine, and the real fills can be still accessed by clicking on the Show me real fills button...
Oh yes, there is another difference between real and hypothetical fills, and that is touch and/or trading through. For the hypotethical fill a touch of the price is sufficient, for real trades the price usually has to trade through...
You are correct that we don't know if the vendor himself trades the system or not and with what kind of fills, but it is not that relevant from the subscriber's POV as fills goes...
