How to use C2's Email Signal Entry System (Beta)

If you own a trading system on Collective2 and want to enter your signals into C2 by sending us an email, you need to follow a very specific format. This document will explain the format.

First, however, we need to stress that email signal entry is not appropriate for everyone.

• Email delivery can be slow, and processing times can not be guaranteed. Sometimes emails bounce around the Internet for several minutes (or even hours!) before they reach their destinations. While this is growing increasingly rare, it could happen. So: if you are entering signals which need to be posted and executed right away, it is probably better to log in to the Collective2 Web site, and use the order entry screen. At a minimum, if you email an absolutely vital signal, you may want to check that it has been processed
• Not all features are available through email.Email allows only the most basic kind of signal entry.

Assuming the limitations above are acceptable to you, here is the way you can use email to enter your trades.

Send your email to: signal@lists.collective2.com

(Please notice the "lists" in the email address above. This is very important.)

Make sure your subject is: C2 Signal
(upper and lowercase do not matter)

The email needs to contain 2 lines which identify you:

systemid=123456

pw=yourC2DataApiPassword

Note that system ID is your system's unique identifier. You can find this out for each of your systems on the C2 Web site:

Your C2 Data API password is NOT your login password. It is a special password you create which allows other programs to access certain portions of your C2 account, but not your entire account. You set this password through the MY ACCOUNT link in the top menu bar.

Finally, you need to include one line that contains your order. Here are some example order lines:

BTO 12 AAPL @ 12.02 LIMIT GTC (stock)

STC 12 AAPL @ MARKET DAY (stock)

BTO 1 @ESH0 @ STOP 1102.50 GTC

BUY 13 EURUSD market

BTO 1 NDYUS LMT .50 GTC (option)

Only one "trade line" should be in an email (that is, only one trade signal per email). The list above is meant to show you a variety of styles of typing the information; it is not meant to suggest that you can have more than one trade per email.

Other notes: capitalization doesn't matter. In many cases the instrument (e.g. stock, option, future) is optional... but it is a good idea to include it in case C2 can't figure out what you mean. In particular, it's impossible to differentiate between "stock" and "option" symbols.

The @ sign isn't necessary when specifying limits, stops, or market orders (but of course is needed when the symbol, such as @ESU7, requires it).

Finally, you can optionally include profit targets and stop losses in your email by including each in its own line:

profittarget=77777
stoploss=123.456

You can include just one of these lines, or both, or neither.

 

Summary

For the purposes of example, here is what a complete email might look like:

To: signal@collective2.com Subject: c2 signal Text: systemid=12345 pw=abracadabra77 BTO 100 IBM LIMIT 12.34 (stock) profittarget=35 stoploss=9

That's it. If the order is processable, C2 will enter it into your system.

Please keep in mind this feature is new, and is in very early beta. Please report problems to us.