Why can't I close a trade through a Rithmic connection, and after a while, other open positions appear in ATAS?

If the connection to Rithmic servers is broken, the platform may not receive up-to-date values of positions and orders states. This means that the orders and positions appearing in the platform may differ from the actual ones. In this way, your actions may lead to a change in the position size that will not be visible in the platform and, consequently, to the uncontrolled financial results.

Example:
If you close the long position in 1 contract, the platform sends the market order for sale of 1 contract. If the Rithmic server hasn t updated position balance data, you re still seeing it in the platform, even though the position may actually be closed.

If you press the CLOSE button five times, in fact you send the order for sale 5 times.

As a result, after the connection is restored or the Rithmic account is reconnected, you see an updated PnL and the open position for sale of 4 contracts. That is, by the first click of the CLOSE button you closed the long position, and by the other 4 clicks you opened the trade for sale of 4 contracts in total.

The ATAS developers have addressed with this problem to the Rithmic company, which advises in such cases to either reconnect or continue trading. However, the responsibility for possible financial losses in this way will be on the user s side.

In such cases, ATAS cannot guarantee that the information displayed is correct. Therefore, our developers have additionally provided 2 mechanisms to protect the trader from such situations:

1. When you receive messages such as PnL Connection - Heartbeat has been quiet for the xx seconds- ATAS displays a pop-up window with the text of the message.

2. If the user then tries to place the orders or change the positions, ATAS will require confirmation of the operation, where all messages from Rithmic received earlier will be indicated:

In this case, the user will need to decide by himself whether to execute the order or not.

Similar messages come up if the user trades through a composite portfolio that includes the Rithmic account which received these messages.

We advise you to reconnect the Rithmic account before continuing trading.

ATAS IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE INCORRECT FUNCTIONING OF THE RITHMIC CONNECTION.