How to Manage Technical Glitches in Trading
Alright our trader friends, what about when you have the best laid plans for a trade setup and entry intentions, and then your system starts glitching and all of the sudden your order intentions are not executed, or copied, or filled anywhere near where you intended to make them? How do you keep your cool and manage your trading session? Has this ever happened to you?
We currently trade with Apex Trader Funding with Rithmic as our communicating data platform between Sierra Charts and Apex Funding. And for anyone who also trades with those companies, you will certainly know what we mean, during the spring and early summer of 2024 at least. Recently, there have been so many issues with order execution, fills, ghost orders, failures at copying and more!
These relevant, current, significant issues with major players in the world of retail trading are really concerning. To manage these system failures, we know that when the issues have been widespread enough, Apex has reset its member’s accounts for all the accounts that ended red on certain given days. As a way to keep the peace. And their business. But then on days where issues occurred but not to as many members or as widely spread, they have not extended the same response and there has been backlash from some members.
It’s a tricky situation for Apex. How much can they give when accounts were damaged by these system errors, but also traders engaged in live trading knowing the system was struggling that day and many also lost just do to failed trades. Is Apex responsible for those failures? Devil’s advocate - what about if you just traded poorly but your system worked well? Then you get the reset benefit and a bit of a “give me” day where your sins are forgiven even though in your heart, you know it wasn’t rithmic. It was failed trades or tilt or overtrading or whatever your trading demons are that were at play that session. I mean, take the gift but also admit the lesson day, learn from it and keep at it, right?
With thousands of members, Apex admin combing through every trade to judge why it ended red is completely unrealistic. We can see why they have had to just decide per day if a blanket reset was warranted or not. It’s been wild times in the prop trading world for sure!
And when there are technical glitches during live trading - do we keep our cool? It’s not always easy to stay calm, focused, and in sync with all our data when we are worried about whether or not our intentions will even be followed through with! Mistakes could be made here…
The larger question is - why is this even happening? One explanation we researched as to the why holds that so many more day traders are trading with funding accounts in recent months to years, and this volume of traffic is increasing very rapidly in the retail trading world. That is over-taxing the systems and they cannot always keep up. Apex has said they are doing server updates frequently to try to combat this issue.
This makes sense, as there does seem to be a volume correlation with it. The glitches are reported as being worse during the first hour of NY session, and during red folder federal news events.
Despite the cause(s), the frustration is widespread in these communities that use these platforms. We personally know many traders, ourselves included, that have experienced glitches with our data during these past few weeks in May/June 2024. And to say it has been frustrating and a legitimate turn-off to these systems would be accurate. Although, we do have to give respect to Apex for responding very actively to these errors and working to make amends and improvements through these issues.
Beyond the prop firm data technical glitches, along this same topic, have you ever just made a technical error on your own accord and then had to manage in real time? Examples being: entering with multiple contracts when you only meant to enter with one, entering in mini contracts when you meant to trade micros, hitting buy instead of sell of vice versa, cancelling your stop loss or target and leaving your trade naked, trading the wrong account… There are so many ways to “click” unintentionally. But then once the click was made, you are in a live trade. And you could not even realize what the error was right away and realize after some damage was potentially done.
You guys, we have to admit these things have happened to us!! And it is stressful! Your mind enters fight or flight mode in those moments and you have to decide on damage control. Ideally, we would always execute how we intend to. But the real world is not perfect, and nor are we. This resonate with any of you? We’d love to hear about your experiences on this topic and how you managed them! Watch our full episode linked above and drop us a comment please.
If, after hearing about our imperfect world of prop retail trading, you are still interested in funding companies, we have provided our coupon code in the link below. That will get you the current best available sale rate on all account sizes with Apex Trader Funding. We have stayed with Apex and respect and appreciate their transparency through these days and overall company morals and open communication. Our best trading days are ahead of us!
Apex Market Mamas Coupon Link: https://apextraderfunding.com/member/aff/go/travelgoals
Apex Market Mamas Coupon Code: ITWJBGKR