Eric

Just finished merging some hotkeys into one, and playing with it in simulation. These will be new operational proportions for now. OCO bracket #1: R = 1%, target = 2% OCO bracket #2: R = 2%, target = 3% OCO bracket #3: R = 3%, target = 5% SwitchTWnd; Share=POS/3; Route=STOP; StopPrice=Bid*0.99; Price=ASk*1.02; Price=Round2; StopPrice=Round2; StopType=RangeMKT; LowPrice=StopPrice; HighPrice=Price; Sell=Send; SwitchTWnd; Share=POS/3; Route=STOP; StopPrice=Bid*0.98; Price=ASk*1.03; Price=Round2; StopPrice=Round2; StopType=RangeMKT; LowPrice=StopPrice; HighPrice=Price; Sell=Send; SwitchTWnd; Share=POS/3; Route=STOP; StopPrice=Bid*0.97; Price=ASk*1.05; Price=Round2; StopPrice=Round2; StopType=RangeMKT; LowPrice=StopPrice; HighPrice=Price; Sell=Send A position is already needed. This just creates the orders, automating the risk management. It's good to use after hitting after taking a partial for example from the original position, or it can be used out of the gate after canceling the previous order (from Kyle's key plus the range order).

7 forces too wide of a range anyhow, if they are to remain visually separate (example short position on BAC below). Will report back if I find a working script that would automatically create a few separate brackets from one key.

But couldn't we just have the double-click set the stop location, set the share amount on the stop to POS, and then set a 2:1 reward/risk ratio?

I have been in this chatroom for over a year and have never seen it explained how these hotkeys can fail in this way or how dangerous that default can be. I presume that you work for DAS Trader. This level of arrogance and unprofessionalism is simply over the top. I am merely trying to warn other traders before they lose money just like I did for this very unfair reason pertaining to DAS Trader’s default configuration. I stand nothing to gain here—except to help others avoid losing money like I did. I was also hoping that DAS Trader would care to hear the ramifications of how dangerous this setting is, but it’s clear that they don’t. I tried, and hopefully someone sees this before it hurts them too. Tired of being trolled by their employee. @Andrew Aziz Please lock this thread. However, I request that you rename it so that it does not say [Resolved] anymore. I know that YOU care about your members, and this active issue can be lethal even to a 100k account, and it’s important for general awareness. This issue is not resolved but I’m clearly getting nowhere here.

That’s fantastic. But for someone who didn’t learn that, what happens if they’re using hotkeys to trade AMZN?

The issue is that their global default for everyone is 1,000 shares. This is the most reckless thing I’ve ever heard of a software company doing. For example, the other day NFLX was dropping and so I wanted to dollar-cost average in with 100 shares at a time. But the default randomly bleed through the hotkey and it stuck me with 1,000 shares (half a million worth of NFLX) while it was dropping like a rock. At the time, I actually did have a 1,000 share hotkey, and so I blamed myself for lapsing and hitting the wrong key. But thousands of dollars down the drain later this kept happening, so I removed all hotkeys except for 100 shares, and then it still kept happening! This is when I contacted DAS support’s live chat and told them what was going on. They apologized that I was having “syntax issues” but assured me that it was not a software issue. Well it is, and one that we now know is hard-coded in by design. Aside from the unsettling fact of the hotkeys randomly being overpowered by this global default, it’s not a bug, it’s just pure negligence and disregard for their customers. I found the root cause and the 2012 documentation confirms it (even though their live chat support was unaware of this supposedly very obvious paragraph on page 5 of their 2012 manual). This is something I had read by the way (out of lack of more updated documentation) but it did not jump out at me because I assumed that their hotkeys were safe and functioned properly. Jokes on me! My trading log already demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that this default will randomly bleed through and ignore the hotkeys. For me, the problem is gone because I changed this global shares default to 100. For all of DAS Trader’s new customers however, what a horribly unfair way to blow up an account and end a trading career before it starts. God help them.

So then DAS Trader really does have 1,000 shares as a default and yet has no concern about the dangers that this poses to their customers, got it. What’s funny though is I don’t see any comments in the “2012 user manual” about the hotkeys randomly failing to do their job at overriding this global default setting for shares.

Then that only furthers my point about how unintuitive it is if everyone becomes confused about this. Also, this order template interface setting was too obscure for even DAS Trader support to be aware of when I was in their live chat and they were lecturing me about how this was not a software problem but entirely my own fault because of the failure of my hotkey syntax. It turns out that it was not. As someone who has been using DAS Trader for over a year, I assumed that the montage switching to the sim account (every time I entered in a new symbol) was a safety mechanism against hotkeys unintentially being firing off when using other apps on the same computer. Such a safety mechanism would logically be an attractive feature if using the SwitchTWnd command, which prepares the montage for a hotkey command, even if the montage is not selected. While digging through areas of the menu, in order searching for the root cause of this logic error that was making me lose thousands of dollars repeatedly, I finally found it. If everyone has 1,000 shares like this by default, (and this wasn’t something that got messed up in just my account somehow), then there could end up being a lot of seriously upset people. I have actually written an academic paper that involved hotkey scripting, which won an award at my university. It was hundreds of pages long, and with an appendix mapping out over 300 DAS Trader hotkeys, so I’m not exactly brand new to this application or generally lacking in due diligence. It is easily considered obscure if an alien and nonessential part of the core experience of the application is something that causes the hotkeys to fail to place orders properly, and is in conflict with how they were instructed to do so. It’s not ok to assume that paying customers of an application are to blame for losing thousands of dollars because they did not dig through an FAQ and find this obscure detail, when this FAQ wasn’t even in any forum directly related to the core product. I have spent many solid hours on these forums trying to learn about DAS and these hotkeys, and yet I never saw any reference to it. And I don’t believe that any trader should be faulted for losing money over this extremely dangerous default configuration just because it is addressed somewhere on a private community’s forum. This is especially true when neither the particular hazard is articulated nor does the hotkey have a programmed ability to stop this.

@Alastair Not sure if you saw, but I did find a permanent solution on a user-to-user basis by changing the Shares value in the Global Default Order Configuration. But this does not do anything for hapless new users unaware of this obscure template settings panel. The simple fix is to give everyone a safe number of default shares. No deep work on the engine required. Hope this was reported up the chain!

@Abiel @Robert H @Andrew Aziz A moderator can now edit the topic of this thread to: DAS 1000 Shares as Default Issue [RESOLVED] You may also edit in this update: UPDATE: I gave DAS another chance and found the root cause. By clicking on Setup > Order Templates, I found the Global Default Order Configuration. On it was a default order for 1,000 shares... I've never seen this interface and had to dig really hard to find it. What has been happening is that every time I entered in a new symbol, these parameters were getting fed into the montage. I never noticed this before because MOST of the time my hotkeys overrode this. However, on occasions, the hotkey would fail to override this very dangerous shares default. This was on a new computer with a fresh image of Windows and DAS install for version 5.5.0.3. To DAS Trader, I lost over 10 thousand dollars because of this repeatedly happening, and even liquidated all of my mutual funds in an attempt to go to another brokers/service before giving this a final chance. Not the end of the world for me, as it was only a couple weeks or so worth of trading progress directly lost over this configuration issue intercepting my hotkey instructions, but this is a very serious problem and potential liability. I don't know how this ended up being a 1,000 share default, but I don't trade with that kind of size and this is really dangerous. Clearly, the hotkey system is not infallible at guarding against this default, as the same thing happened to me 5 times in one day according to my Trades log. This could blow up a 30k account in less than 5 minutes if trading something like NFLX. Please look into why I ended up with this as a default, and consider something safer as a default, such as 100 shares or even 10.

@Abiel I've decided to give DAS/IB a second chance because I found a workaround that will be able to prevent this glitch. As long as I manually enter 100 as a share value into the montage, it shouldn't be misfiring on every 40 or so of my orders and adding that extra zero. CenterPoint Securities has not responded to my inquiry yet, but they apparently have no native way to report on or manage delta dollars like IB does, which is my favorite feature and lets me hedge with options knowing the exact realtime balance. CenterPoint has an extra service for this which they call their Risk Manager/Portfolio Margin Solution, but they charge 2k/month for this when delta dollars is free on IB and native to the Portfolio tab, so long as you select it for a column. Really bothers me though that I can't do OCO orders with DAS using a trailing stop. Sterling Trader lets you do that by holding down the control button to select a batch of orders, and then right clicking to assign them as an OCO group. @peterB I have about 17 video-recorded examples of Interactive Brokers natively mixing up the automatically [attached] stop loss and profit targets, suddenly giving them all buy instead or sell or vice versa until I restart it. I no longer use those kind of orders with them. Was a year ago but no reason for me to start trusting them with that. They say that it intelligently selects the right direction, and it would for a while, but once it got confused it would do that to every single new order. Forced me to close and reopen IB sometimes over 12 times a day.

@vic Lightspeed would charge me 6.50% margin interest, which would break my entire playbook. This is compared to 0.75% margin interest at CenterPoint Securities. For example, I like to hold bond ETFs in excess of my account value and collect 3% yields on them. With a margin interest rate of 0.75% I can still collect about 2% arbitrage on that. But with 6.5% interest I would be forced to outperform that extra cost per dollar invested just to break even. Can't see any reason to do that when I'd just be using Sterling Trader anyway as the software interface, while also getting direct access and the largest supply of stocks available for shorting.

@RTrader I have had the same experience dozes of times myself with uneven ghost orders. However, my biggest complaint about DAS Trader by far is the lack of conditional logic, meaning that I can't do genuine bracket orders. Sure I can do a clunky range order, but those lack agility to say the least as a hotkey, and I can't use trailing stops which are essential to my system. Instead I have to stand there and cancel the other manually after a target or stop gets hit. Walking away with both a stop and target active can lead to very unusual and dangerous positions... Why would I be trading futures? Those are a real puzzle to hedge overnight, and during the intraday I have more control with shares and can let them run without worrying about extreme leverage from /ES or /NQ, both of which have liquidity issues--where you are basically trading against the CME computers rather than enjoying direct access. I'm actually trying to break into the futures, but finding a way to manage the risk has been keeping me distant. My reason would be to add a part-time job overnight, but if I am sufficiently capitalized for shares, I'm simply not following as to why I would be trading futures on the intraday. The micro contracts have even worse liqudity. Besides, when trading with shares I can bag hold if they get trapped and convert them into options structures, such as a short iron condor but with shares instead of held calls.

No, those are all synthetic calls using the hotkey I showed you to buy 100 shares of AAPL at a time. All the red triangles are 10% or 33% partials. What makes them synthetic calls was having a net bearish options position, negating the need for a stop loss when buying shares.

@Abiel Perhaps this is because I have been putting a unique amount of stress on the application. Would I be correct to assume that you have not seen this level of trading volume either? 1k trades/day? That might have something to do with it.