More than a Chinese Wall, Your Trading Secrets are Safe

Emails and message board posts mentioned recently a fear that when it comes to automating a trader’s trading strategies, their broker can either:

• See your strategies
• Trade against them
• Front run them or some combination thereof

In terms of the Trade-Ideas Automated Trading Bot (ATB) we want to make sure that those fears are put to rest. The only thing that your broker will see from you is dust, or in trading terms, the orders that you send out at the time you send them. One of the big advantages of using the Trade-Ideas automated trading system as an independent tool is a complete decoupling from your executing broker. This even applies to the current pilot partners testing Trade-Ideas’ automation.

By design the Trade-Ideas ATB separates from the broker the strategies, which are based on alerts and filters from the trade instructions, which tell the robot what to do. Details like which way you are going (i.e., long or short) are not attached to the system you are trading through in any way. It is impossible for anyone much less a broker to know what you really intend on doing. Secondly your automated trading system is on a completely separate application which only talks to your broker via an API once there is a signal that needs to be traded.

Unlike TradeStation and some other tightly bundled broker-developed products, Trade-Ideas shields your strategy from our broker partners. Your broker can’t tell the difference between you placing a trade manually and the ATB placing a trade programmatically.

I think that’s powerful information that only a trader should have. In poker terms that’s keeping your cards close to the chest.