Orders were placed in my account without my permission

The way we have built our system, it is not possible to do any kind of activity in your trading accounts by an outsider. But still on extremely rare occasions, we do get this question asked… “Can you please check, I did not place this order?“

First thing you must understand is, all actions or operations executed by our systems will always be as a result of our user’s actions. Example, users placing orders manually or his automated strategies are placing order. Our system is extremely secure, you can read more about security in this security concerns article.

Any activity in your system can only happened by an authorized user in following ways:

• User manually places orders from AutoTrader Web’s website
  • Accessible only with AutoTrader Web’s login credentials
• User’s automated trading strategies place orders or manual orders via our Excel tools
  • Accessible only with AutoTrader Web’s API key
• User directly places orders in account from broker’s trading platform
  • Accessible only with your Stoke Broker’s trading platform login credentials

Solution

Now, let us look at what can be done in such cases.

1. If you do automated trading, then the first thing you should check is all of your strategy logs.
2. AutoTrader Web is designed to be completely transparent. Every time there an operation being executed, the system tracks it in activity logs. This is the best place to figure out all operations done from AutoTrader Web.
3. You also must remember the fact, that your account can directly be accessed from your broker’s trading platform. So an order could have directly been placed from broker’s trading platform.
4. If you cannot find anything in logs. Then the next sensible thing to do is to check with your stock broker. Normally all brokers keep logs of the activity in trading accounts. So ask them for details of all order placed on that day.
5. Look for user login messages in the activity logs
6. AutoTrader Web as well as the trading systems of most top brokers are pretty safe. So unless your credentials fell into someone’s hands; it is not possible for any outsider to place an order into your account.
7. Hence it is strongly advised to immediately change your trading platform password & AutoTrader Web’s login password as well as API Key.

Most likely causes

• An account is being operated by more than one user & there is miscommunication
• Trader just places wrong order in the heat of trading and forgets it
• A badly written automation code places unexpected order (example, passes wrong symbol or quantity)
• The order was placed by the stock broker’s Risk team or RMS system in case of margin shortfall or intraday square-off
• The broker’s staff enters manual orders as part of their Call & Trade service. In some cases, we have heard mistakes made by broker’s staff during data entry (wrong account number). So basically some other user’s call & trade order was placed in your account by mistake.

There are many other things that can cause this. But if it happens due to a bug in AutoTrader Web. The user will definitely be able to find it using our activity logs which provide complete transparency.