DAS 1000 Shares as Default Issue [RESOLVED]

[Kendrick C. 7]

Sorry for your story.

It seems that DAS has a bug in its SwitchTWnd command.

I have reported it in previous post, but seems it's not attended enough.

 

[vic 11]

18 hours ago, Eric said:

@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.

I don't pay 6.5% margin interest, if you do volume nobody beats LS you have to talk to them. 

Sterling merged with Lightspeed fyi  

 

 

 

Edited May 29, 2020 by vic

[Eric 6]

@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.

 

[Eric 6]

@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.

 

[Alastair 110]

Very very happy a work around has been found. BUT it is a bug in the app, as it is not following normal logical.  Based on the information a pattern after every 40+ trades, is being reported.

So it does need investigation by DAS around the original prob with the knowledge of tht error pattern and the temp solution.

Good work to ALL who contributed to temp solution.

 

 

[Kendrick C. 7]

@Eric DAS has a bug in the SwitchTWnd command, which would randomly ignore its following commands, like setting the share size.

Not too many people issue the SwitchTWnd command before the sending orders, so this bug is not well recognized in this community.

You can easily verify this bug with the following scripts. You'll find the share size is not changed 100% of the times in the Montage window.

SwitchTWnd;Share=Pos*0.5

I think you can try to claim your losses from DAS. Good luck!

[Eric 6]

@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 474]

Eric, this is not an "obscure template settings" as it is the solution to avoid montage changing from live account to paper trading account, every new live trader ask about this and is pointed to our DAS FAQ in the forums, this is the forum thread. 

[Eric 6]

1 hour ago, Abiel said:

Every new live trader ask about this and is pointed to our DAS FAQ in the forums.

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.

[Abiel 474]

Eric, that setting is in the 2012 DAS Trader Pro User Manual:

Quote

SET A DEFAULT ACCOUNT
Go to “Setup” on the menu bar, select “Order Templates”. Select the exchanges you trade on
from the drop down menu following “Exchange.” Then select your account from the drop
down menu following “Account”. Then you can set your default number of shares, your
preferred Route, AON/ANY and Time in Force settings at the other boxes or drop down menus.
Make sure you set your default for each exchange you trade on. Click OK when you are
satisfied with the new changes

 

[Eric 6]

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.

[Alastair 110]

Eric, easy way to test it.....change default to 99 or 98......and see if the error continues as 1000.  If the current assumption is valid u should get 99/98 not 1000 order.....and its close to ur normal trade amt so financially its not big loss/profit.

If is not a bug is lack of documentation for Switch command.

Maybe when u use Switch to Window it defaults all values.....also I have a DEFAULT montage layouts saved which I use when duplicating a window.  So it could be taking values from either of those two defaults.

[Eric 6]

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.

[Abiel 474]

One of the first things I learnt in sim was to change the default amount of shares. 

[Eric 6]

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