Tradetron is an excellent platform to fully automate your trading strategies. However, similar to every automation, this also carries some inherent risk due to the absence of human decision-making. The most common issue with Tradetron is execution errors, but if you know how to properly handle those then it’s not going to cause much trouble to you and your portfolio. In this article, we’ll explain a step-by-step process for handling execution errors in Tradetron.
What are Execution Errors in Tradetron?
You might already know that Tradetron automates your trades based on the rules defined in your trading strategy. So when the rule condition is met it auto executes the order at your broker terminal on your behalf.
Execution error happens when the order placement is failed for some reason. And it might cause problems such as:
- Positions are not correctly taken based on strategy rules
- Short position on equity remains open at EOD
- Stop loss order gets missed exposing you to unlimited risk
- Not all legs of options strategy are executed
Also Read: How to find the Best Strategies from Tradetron Marketplace?
How Tradetron notifies about Execution Errors?
Fortunately, Tradetron has a powerful notification engine that triggers a notification as soon as an execution error happens.
Instant notification gets generated either through Phone, Email, or Whatsapp. And when you get notified, you can log in to your Tradetron dashboard and check the notification logs of the particular strategy to see why the execution error happened.
Based on what you see in the notification logs, you may go ahead and remediate those errors OR retry execution.
Common Execution Errors in Tradetron
Below are the most common execution errors:
Token Generation Error
Tradetron interacts with broker terminals through access tokens. For most of the brokers, these tokens have certain validity and hence they need to be generated every 24 hours. Although Tradetron supports automatic token generation, yet there may be issues sometimes due to various reasons.
The good thing is that you will get notified through email before the market opens if any token generation issue happens.
To fix this, you’ll need to manually generate the token. It can be done through the “Broker and Exchanges” page. Also, you should check if you have a valid API subscription from your broker.
Insufficient Funds
Sometimes brokers change their margin requirements due to market volatility. If you haven’t estimated these changes upfront, you might see errors due to margin shortage.
Margin shortage can be very dangerous in the case of multi-legged option positions. If only certain legs of the options strategy are executed, it might expose you to unlimited risk. Hence, it is recommended to immediately square off the executed positions when this happens.
Far month options rejected
Most of the brokers reject market orders for a far-month option. This is mainly due to liquidity issues.
The best way to deal with this is to either not have far-month options in your strategy OR chose brokers that allow far-month options.
Unknown Errors
This is the most dangerous part where you get error execution notification but when you check error logs there is nothing fruitful there.
This happens rarely but still, it’s a matter of concern. The most common reason for such unknown errors is a messaging/API glitch between Tradetron to broker or vice versa.
As soon as you see such unknown errors, you should open a chat and report them to TT support.
Also Read: Getting Started with Tradetron – The Automated Trading Platform
Steps to handle Execution Errors in Tradetron
Always keep an eye on your deployments. It is very important to resolve Tradetron execution errors as soon as you notice it / or get a notification from Tradetron. When there is an error in execution, the deployment goes into an inactive state and the risk management does not work.
The first step is to not panic (there is always a 50% chance of a favorable outcome. Eg: error in selling the PE leg in falling markets and vice-versa). There are 3 options to manage errors on Tradetron:
COMPLETE MANUALLY
Always check the broker terminal before taking any action. Sometimes the trades are executed, but the API does not communicate it to Tradetron.
- If the trade is already executed, click “Completed manually”. You can also edit the traded price in this option. Enter the exact price. Never enter wrong prices. It will impact the risk management and the final PNL.
- If the trade has not executed, you can place it manually on the broker terminal and edit the price on TT.
TRY AGAIN
If the trade has not executed, you can also use this option for automatic execution (instead of manually placing the trade). It can take up to a minute to execute the order. So please wait and do not take any further action.
CANCEL
This option will not place a trade. We don’t recommend this especially for multi-legged option positions
It is also possible that the strategy may go into execution error due to the strategy logic itself. If you have created your own strategy you should figure out the error-prone logic.
And if you have deployed a strategy from the marketplace, contact the strategy creator to fix it. Also, paper trade for atleast a month before deploying any strategy live.
Final Thoughts
Any automated platform with integration among so many different components is prone to such execution errors. It might not always be an issue with Tradetron, in fact, most of the errors happen due to broker API issues or RMS problems.
We feel that Tradetron is doing its best to minimize the execution errors and implementing faster retries. However, perfection is just another myth and you should never wait for it!
Follow the steps mentioned in this article to handle the common execution errors and you would do just fine. Yes, there is some risk involved but those risks are worth taking for all the benefits you are getting with Tradetron!
Follow this link to open an account with Tradetron.