what's the deal with collective2?

[Zig Zag North]

Quote from ML_QUANT:

Are there any other sites providing the same concept but better facilitated and with less of these problems that C2 has?

There are other 3rd party trading system monitoring systems like Theta Research and timertrac. Never used em, so can't say if they're "better."

I used C2 to track my system simply because it appeared to have more traffic (i.e. more potential subscribers). But I've gotten a lot more subscribers by simply running Google ads to my website. Have gotten some activity in C2 but not as much as I hoped.

C2's primary flaw is the grid, or it's system comparison system. It artificially pumps up some terrible systems at the expense of better systems. Sure, it has a ton of systems, but no good way to sort and filter for the systems that fit my personal criteria.

 

[oraclewizard77]

I had a system on C2 which was in the top 5 system for a long time. I made around $ 500/month from subscribers after c2 took 30% of my profits.

I did trade it with real money but a very small account.

It was a forex system and some trades in my real account would work out fine but C2 would close the trade out at a loss since you could not have a long and short trade on at the same time in C2 but you can for your real forex account. Also, they never let you do a trailing stop in C2 like you can do with most real trading platforms in I believe futures as well as forex.

I stopped trading at C2 since I did not want to pay the renewal fee and the subscription accounts already paid off my car which is what I did it for. Also, trading forex how I did it before has not been working in the last few months where you can have overnight 200 to 400 pip moves in a currency pair where I was used to 30 pip moves when holding overnight.

Also, I currently work during the day, and it was a hassle for me to enter in duplicate trade for both the real account and the C2 account. Also, I really did not put alot of effort into the trades. I did not have time to wait for a high probability trade based on my technical indicators, so just made an educated guess since I did not want to work more than 30 min a week on the system. Again this is because I already work full time right now. Also, I did not want to really use my edge on C2 in case someone could reverse engineer my trades. Finally, its obviously harder to trade forex when most brokers trade against your account. Finally, I would just sleep through a real trade, and would not be watching it when it reversed against me.

If I free up enough time, I plan to use my edge and just trade for myself using a futures accounts during the day time when I can wait for perfect setups.

There are some c2 systems that are still in the top 5 after many years, but many of them are expensive unless you have a large account size. I have seen some good systems that lasted over a year crash and burn in a matter of days. I think C2 is dying out with less traders and less developers.

If you can make money trading your own accounts, I don't see a real reason to waste time or money on C2 either creating a system or becoming a subscriber. Also, I would suggest that you should not assume that C2 will make you any more money with less risk than investing in a good mutual fund or diversify in different funds with a ten year track record especially if you don't have time to trade for yourself.

Finally, some systems on C2 would be doing well when the market was trending a certain way while the ones that were fighting the trend would blow up. However, once the trend changed, you would see these systems that had say 25% 45% 15% for 3 months, then have a 90% loss in the 4th month. I saw this one guy there who had like 15 systems have a good system for awhile then blow up his account and then start a new system. I think his current system has some subscribers but I am not going to warn anyone against him.

 

[Zig Zag North]

Quote from oraclewizard77:

There are some c2 systems that are still in the top 5 after many years, but ...

This statement above is the exact problem with C2. "Top 5" system, based on what? Based on crappy metrics that explode in your face when the market does anything unusual. It makes all the traffic float to "popular" systems that are ranked high based on unusual metrics.

But I digress, you're right oracle, a lot of the systems are fully based on survivorship bias. Make five systems and kill the bottom 4 and viola, you have make an awesome system. Hopefully there aren't too many fools to fall for simple tricks like that.

I don't agree that you would've turned down $500/mo in profits. You probably lost all your subs after your system took a downturn and just gave up. Also, C2 has an api that you can use to program in your trades. You could've borrowed a developer for $500 to automate that for you and saved all the time.

 

[oraclewizard77]

It actually still shows that I have 5 subs even though I stopped trading the system.

Yes, the system did take a down turn and I lost many of the subs, and if I could continue to make $ 500 per month, I would have renewed the system. I did trade out of most of the draw down, but was not getting new subscriptions so I decided it was not worth my money or time to keep the system going.

I tried to design the system to get subs by only going for a certain % per month of profit to create a good looking equity curve, since this is the type of system that subs want. The only difference is that I actually traded to get the system to work where some hedge funds just pay out old subs with new subs money to create their equity curve and never actually trade. Also, I had some problems with revenge trading and money management during the draw down which I working to improve on if I trade futures by creating a limit on the amount of money I will lose for the day rather than trying to "win" it back. Also, instead of limiting the profit in months that I am trading well, I am going to let the profit and winners run for awhile instead of letting my losers run.

Its funny, but you can develop an edge based system but if you don't get the psychology and money management right, you will start to get big draw downs which is probably why there are not many full time traders.

Quote from Zig Zag North:

This statement above is the exact problem with C2. "Top 5" system, based on what? Based on crappy metrics that explode in your face when the market does anything unusual. It makes all the traffic float to "popular" systems that are ranked high based on unusual metrics.

But I digress, you're right oracle, a lot of the systems are fully based on survivorship bias. Make five systems and kill the bottom 4 and viola, you have make an awesome system. Hopefully there aren't too many fools to fall for simple tricks like that.

I don't agree that you would've turned down $500/mo in profits. You probably lost all your subs after your system took a downturn and just gave up. Also, C2 has an api that you can use to program in your trades. You could've borrowed a developer for $500 to automate that for you and saved all the time.

 

[ML_QUANT]

All in all, some very useful insights and so far I'm not favoring C2 anymore after all I've read here to become a developer to!
The trading against the mass does seem interesting but the problem will be not all of them would be trading the same and one has to choose only one or in the case of several will require several accounts too but they should average out OK though

 

[Pekelo]

Quote from ML_QUANT:

All in all, some very useful insights and so far I'm not favoring C2 anymore after all I've read here to become a developer to!

There is nothing wrong with C2, as long as users understand and accept the inherent problems and characteristics of it. It can be used for 3 things:

1. Testing. For this purpose it is excellent and for $100 you get to try out your ideas, and in return you get good statistics on them. In real life it would cost you way more...

2. Subscribing to vendors: I would say there are 4-5 decent systems in each categories( stocks/futures/forex/options), but buyer beware! Vendors don't always stick to their masterplain and they do violate their rules!

3. Selling systems: As long as you write a decent business plan (explaining what you do and what subscribers can get) and you stick to it and you keep producing the result, you can get subscribers but keep in mind that not every subscriber is smart in choosing systems and the competition is still pretty high even against crappy systems (because the crappiness is not always obvious)

C2 is basicly a big competition and to be able to make money as a vendor, you need to publish better than average results. If your system uses stocks and makes 10% per month with smal DD, that is very good, but because futures systems can do much better you might not gonna get subcribers...

So you have to know what you want and go from there...

 

[sim03]

Quote from Pekelo:

It is not very well known, but it is possible to fadetrade a system, thus taking exactly the opposite position of the vendor's.

Since most systems eventually lose money, 5-10 randomly choosen new systems fadetraded should make money in the long run.

Quote from O-3:

yes would be nice to set that up so it would autotrade, I can't see how it could be done though.

Quote from rolextrader:

Probably can't autotrade it on C2, but if you subscribe to a few lousy systems (and there's no shortage on C2), and you can fade the trades after you get the signal from e-mail or text message or whatever.

The more I think about this idea, the more I like it. In fact, given the terrible performance of most active C2 systems, this might be the Grail.

Auto-fading any system or a portfolio of systems could not be easier on C2.

On your personal AutoTrading Setup page, all you need to do is check the "Contrarian Trader - Trade opposite of system?" checkbox. See the attached screenshot. That's it... done.

Having done that, the good news now is that no manual work on your part is involved in automatically executing the opposite signals in your brokerage account 24/5, like clockwork, while you go about your life.

The bad news is that you still need to commit to actively constructing, scaling, monitoring, managing and modifying your portfolio of C2 systems to fade. That takes both expertise and time. Still (almost) no free lunch.

The last thing you want to do is to get greedy with leverage and risk blowing up your account, just because a couple of those supposedly unprofitable systems you've selected hit a nice long winning streak at the same time (and, dammit, they will).

 

[ML_QUANT]

Quote from Pekelo:

There is nothing wrong with C2, as long as users understand and accept the inherent problems and characteristics of it. It can be used for 3 things:

1. Testing. For this purpose it is excellent and for $100 you get to try out your ideas, and in return you get good statistics on them. In real life it would cost you way more...

2. Subscribing to vendors: I would say there are 4-5 decent systems in each categories( stocks/futures/forex/options), but buyer beware! Vendors don't always stick to their masterplain and they do violate their rules!

3. Selling systems: As long as you write a decent business plan (explaining what you do and what subscribers can get) and you stick to it and you keep producing the result, you can get subscribers but keep in mind that not every subscriber is smart in choosing systems and the competition is still pretty high even against crappy systems (because the crappiness is not always obvious)

C2 is basicly a big competition and to be able to make money as a vendor, you need to publish better than average results. If your system uses stocks and makes 10% per month with smal DD, that is very good, but because futures systems can do much better you might not gonna get subcribers...

So you have to know what you want and go from there...

What you say makes a lot of sense.
You're right, in the futures side and specially scalping will prove very difficult to convince any1 about the robustness of ones system but on the other hand, the 10% monthly with very small DD and consistence is very doable if the audience find that convincing? Hence this might be quite the right approach to the issue of establishing one's performance?
For that I'll need to switch to swings and use IB then since I do my equity with them or alternatively use NT for placing my IB trades, which is the best approach of the 2?

thanks for info so far.

 

[popstocks]

After a lot of consideration I've decided the whole things is a scam.

Let's see here:

Vendors have to pay $98 every 6 months to get their system listed. Then C2 takes %30 of the vendors sales.

If C2 truly had a thriving platform there would never be a bi-annual fee to the vendors. The fact that you have to pay this fee before you ever even get your first paying subscriber is pure crap. It seems that the reason they charge vendors a fee simply to open up shop is primarily because most systems never attract enough paying customers to satiate C2's greed.

Let's say there really are vendors on C2 pulling in 10-20g a month, let's pretend there are 10 really popular systems that are pulling in a total of 150g a month, so C2 gets %30 of that each month (45g). With 45g monthly revenue from those 10 vendors alone, why then do they need to put up cheesy google ads on their site, why do they need to charge a fee for each side of an autotrade? Their entire business must cost less than 15g to run each month, and that's being very liberal on the estimate.

Hmm, why are they nickle and diming everyone if they are already reeling in all this money through their successful vendors?? The reason they are nickle and diming is because, their most successful vendors don't actually make 10-20g a month.

Now lets have a look at the page views on their "most popular" system "Main qqqq":
It has been viewed 7,729 times by unique IP's and the system is over a year old.

Now I've worked in online sales before and it's pretty safe to say that out of 500 viewers you might get one sale. So based on that this very popular system may have only 20 subscribers at best. And as far as I can tell you do have to view the page to be able to subscribe. Now let's say only 1/2 of those subscribers ever held on past the first few months (very likely) then we are looking at 10 subscribers on one of C2's most popular systems. This system charges $85 per month. So based on all this conjecture C2 would be making only around $255 per month on their most profitable system.

As a subscriber to C2, you have to pay whatever the vendor's fee is and on top of that pay an extra $1 or $2 fee (to collective) per side for the "generation 3" link to your broker. How lame is that, I know I would not want to join C2 knowing this alone.

Look how C2 tries to pretend this is not their fee but somehow the greedy broker's fee: "Cost: Demo account: free. Live account: commission + $1.99 per contract side AutoTrade fee charged by broker"

Yet OEC has this to say: "Open E Cry charges its normal commission for each trade. In addition there is a $1.99 fee (charged by Collective2) for each contract/side that is executed through AutoTrading."

The brokers have no incentive to charge more for autotrading, they simply want their customers to trade more and more, if autotrading is what makes them do this, then great. It's obvious it is C2 charging this ridiculous Autotrading fee to the subscribers who are already shelling out money to the vendors who give %30 to C2, pretzel logic.

And the reason there are all these dumb fees and ugly ads and no statistics about how many subscribers a system has and system reviewers are kept anonymous is because ....... C2 is a farce!

If they weren't a farce, a lot more brokers would have already adopted their platform.

 

[Pekelo]

Let's just start with the fact that you are an idiot who doesn't know anything about business, and I will prove it step by step. Shall we?

Quote from popstocks:

If C2 truly had a thriving platform there would never be a bi-annual fee to the vendors.

Why not? Reasons to charge vendors:

1. It is extra money for the site. Why Tramp is selling steaks? Because it is extra money for him!!
2. It filters out every highschool student/newbie who would sign up for free and slow down the system.
3. For a newbie losing only $100 in every 6 months is a dirt cheap education and for a vendor a very cheap advertisement!
4. It costed time, money and intellectual power to make the site. It probably didn't make it back for the first 3 years.


The fact that you have to pay this fee before you ever even get your first paying subscriber is pure crap.

Not every vendor is a trading pro. The site can be used for testing strategies or practicing trading. Why should it be free? It is a valuable service, you don't get value for nothing.

Most system are crap by definition and wouldn't get subscribers, so the only way to make money out of them is to charge them a fee for services provided. C2 provides a trading platform with statistical data.

Let's say there really are vendors on C2 pulling in 10-20g a month,

This is a wet dream and unsupported assumption, simply not true.

do they need to put up cheesy google ads on their site,

It is extra money, why would they miss that opportunity? Not to mention the ads are trading related...

why do they need to charge a fee for each side of an autotrade?

Because nothing valuable in real life is free? After all, once you set it up, you don't have to do shit!

Their entire business must cost less than 15g to run each month, and that's being very liberal on the estimate.

You forgot the years and countless hours invested in developing and perfecting the program.

their most successful vendors don't actually make 10-20g a month.

That was YOUR unsupported assumption, idiot.

per month on their most profitable system.

It is among the most POPULAR not the most profitable, have I mentioned idiot?


I would not want to join C2 knowing this alone.

Nobody forces you... If you don't like it, don't use it...

By the way you should decide if you want to bitch from the subscriber's or the vendor's side...

C2 has its problems what we already discussed in this thread, but your not understanding a business model and appreciating the work what was put in it is just an expression of your simple mindedness.

But thanks for the entertainment...

P.S.: Assuming you are a profitable trader looking for investors, let's see if you can advertise your system/service for less than $200 per year to a wide audience!