Reply from InvestormindApr 14, 2024
Hi there
Appreciate your desire to educate other investors & ensure they make truly sound financial decisions.
This is something we take very seriously.
With that said, you are correct as we did experience a 3rd party tech issue and take full responsibility to resolve this for our clients.
Our futures trades on something called ‘next tick execution’
This next tick execution means that when the signal of the algorithm meets the market, a signal is sent to the broker to execute on the next tick.
During periods of high trading volatility, a platform must maintain flawless performance to ensure that execution occurs when it is intended.
We track master accounts so that we can verify daily what client results are expected to be.
This week while performing our standard tech audit we discovered that several clients trading executions were suddenly lagging behind that next tick, causing missed trades.
This was occurring on tech stacks which have never previously had this issue.
We take this issue incredibly seriously, and as soon as we learned of it, we checked with multiple clients. Most clients were not affected, while unfortunately others were.
Immediately we paused all active trading on that particular strategy and tech stack.
Actions we have taken since learning of this issue on Tuesday:
We have immediately paused active trading while our team reviews our entire tech stack
We have conducted a full audit of our network infrastructure
We have redeployed new servers directly next to our current broker
We are currently conducting server load testing which we anticipate will be completed in 7 days
At present, we use the market leading broker platform for algorithmic trading on futures.
In the last 3 weeks; this broker rolled out 3 unexpected platform updates. At this moment we believe (and we have spoken with several within the industry familiar with this platform), that these updates may have created some instability in the platforms data infrastructure.
To remedy this for clients who have been impacted we are rolling out one of our private strategies that we do not typically sell.
This strategy has been producing returns twice as high as the futures algorithm our retail clients typically get and is reserved for our Institutional clients.
We want to ensure that the experience and results that clients get with us is second to none.
The first installations of that strategy are currently being done on the new server infrastructure over the weekend and will go live on Monday.
They will run through a quick demo test to ensure the tech stack is solid and then they will begin trading.
We are adding this strategy to our current clients at no cost, to ensure that any capital which was lost during this tech issue is recovered very quickly and they can get back to doing what they came for.
It is certainly difficult for us, when relying on 3rd party infrastructure, when an issue arises that we are not in control of, such as a platform update causing trading issues
Despite the challenges when relying on a 3rd party infrastructure we are certainly aware that the responsibility of maintaining excellence and high standards in terms of product / experience for our clients falls on our shoulders.
This is something we truly take serious.
Again, appreciate you sharing. Please dont hesitate to reach out if there’s anything we can support you with in addition to fixing this issue.