We have the pleasure to announce that we are finally rolling out DARWIN conditional orders in the live environment. Demand was so strong, this just couldn’t wait any longer!
Conditional orders for live accounts
The DARWIN Exchange now supports conditional orders in the live environment.
Investors may now enter conditional orders so that when a DARWIN quote:
- Falls to a certain level, they buy it (Buy limit)
- Rises to certain level, they buy it (Buy stop)
- Falls to a certain level, they sell it (Stop Loss)
- Rises to a certain level, they sell it (Take Profit)
NB: we’ve disabled Buy stops for now – we will activate them once everyone is comfortable with the other 3 limit order types.
In order to launch conditional orders in the live environment, we’ve also had to launch another much demanded feature – DARWIN candle charts.
Introducing DARWIN candle charts
We’re introducing candle charts, not for the purpose of charting, but to be as transparent as possible on whether DARWIN quotes hit a given level.
Candles represent a given time interval and have:
- Opening quote: the first quote at the start of the interval represented by the candle
- Closing quote: the last quote during the interval represented by the candle
- High: highest quote in the interval
- Low: lowest quote in the interval
Note that due to differences in the frequency of tick price movements and duration of candle periods, the close quote for a candle need not necessarily match the open quote for the succeeding candle.
Price granularity
Price granularity is a trade-off between accuracy/transparency and computational efficiency. Pick too little, and compromise transparency. Pick too much, and waste resources.
This is why we’ve opted for a 3-Tier approach:
- Second level granularity: on quotes in the DARWIN platform since 15 August 2017
- Minute granularity: for the period between IPO/validation of the Darwin in question and the 15 August 2017
- Hourly granularity: for the period pre Darwin IPO/validation, when there were no investors in the DARWIN. Transparency requirements are lowest – these are “fictitious” quotes that no investor experienced!
- Exception on DARWIN re-sets: on occasions, owing to some execution issue on a DARWIN’s underlying strategy, DARWIN equity curves must be “simulated” back to what they would have been barring the execution issues. For the period where the curve has had to be re-created, or needs to be recreated in the future, granularity will be on an hourly basis (just like pre-IPO), and not on a minute/second basis as you would otherwise expect.
You might ask yourself, “Why only second level granularity from 15th August 2017?”. Well, it’s simple really. We simply didn’t think that we would need this level of detail.
Separately, we are aware that the treatment of exceptions is sub-optimal. Be assured however that there’s ongoing work both to minimise the probability of execution disruptions and to resolve the mismatch between the actual and “optimal” DARWIN equity curve. Unfortunately this is not a trivial issue, so it will take time to fix.
Drawdown calculation
We will continue to calculate Drawdowns off the “Return Chart”. Note that this still doesn’t reflect the “Min” Candle – we’re working on fixing this. Meanwhile, we preferred to release the candles over waiting for ironing out all related issues.
Thank you for your understanding and we look forward to your feedback on how to improve the platform!