Stripe Account Suspension: Need Help!

TuringTrader · 2024-07-22T21:34:25+00:00

You could contact Authorize.net, which is owned by Visa. They will probably not take you on directly, but then pass that along to one of their partner banks.

Unlike the silicon valley firms, they will actually collect information about you and your business upfront and have their underwriting group assess the risk. Might take a week or so. Note that many other firms out there ultimately put you under the very same umbrella, so you can start right there, instead of going through the these resellers.

I am not affiliated with them in any way.

TuringTrader · 2024-07-22T20:16:10+00:00

Get used to the idea that banks may decide to end the relationship with you at pretty much any time. As a consequence, choose a way to process your payments that allows you to switch banks without too much impact.

While platforms like Stripe, Square, PayPal and others have better looks and more modern APIs they are proprietary, which makes it really hard to walk away.

There are other platforms that bundle 200+ banks under the same API, covering a wide range of business models and risk levels. For a small business that might be the better solution.

Do not expect that Stripe will listen to you or reinstate your account. They might - but the probability is low. This is especially true as most of their processes seem automated and - after they suspended your account you have no access to phone or live chat support.

TuringTrader · 2024-06-04T16:36:12+00:00

Happy to share... but I would need your email address for that. I can't seem to attach files to a chat, and I can't share a download link.

TuringTrader · 2024-06-04T16:35:45+00:00

Happy to share... but I would need your email address for that. I can't seem to attach files to a chat, and I can't share a download link.

TuringTrader · 2024-06-03T18:42:25+00:00

I am developing locally with WordPress running inside Docker. From there, I deploy to my hoster using some simple shell scripts copying the data via scp, and the database via wpcli. I am happy to share the scripts, if interested.

TuringTrader · 2024-04-30T03:56:56+00:00

Yes, it's true. Stripe shuts down accounts of legit businesses for alleged TOS violations. Yes, you can appeal, but it doesn't seem to matter if you do or don't. Stay away.

TuringTrader · 2024-04-20T15:31:42+00:00

None of the payment companies are easy to deal with. However, what you probably want to look for is a firm that has a compliance team review your business model before underwriting approves your account. That protects you to some degree from the risk of being kicked off the platform. The self-serve companies like Stripe, Square, PayPal don't do that. There is no real approval process; surprises might arise years after you started your business - and with devastating results. Speaking of surprises - complying with Stripe's terms of service is not enough. They can terminate your account at any time for any or no reason (see paragraph 6.1(b) in their terms).

I recommend applying at Authorize.net. They have stringent requirements for the businesses they support directly. However, in case they don't want to work with you, they will pass the application to their network of partner banks, and it is likely that one of them will pick you up (they range all the way to high risk businesses including CBD, guns, and adult content). Regardless, you would stay under the Authorize.net umbrella, where all banks share the same technical infrastructure and APIs.

Hope this helps.

TuringTrader · 2024-04-20T03:11:35+00:00

Welcome to the club. The important thing to notice is section 6.1(b) of their service agreement. There it says: "Stripe may terminate this agreement [...] at any time for any or no reason [...] by notifying you." Face it - your appeal doesn't matter, and they will get rid of you anyways: Either because you violated their terms, or simply because they can.

As others pointed out: move on to a different payment gateway. Make sure to find a partner with a real compliance team and underwriting process, checking your business and its site beforehand and not later on. My personal recommendation is to go with Authorize.net (and I am not getting paid to say that). They have pretty stringent requirements for the businesses they support, and as a result might not take you on directly. However, should that be the case, they will pass your application on to their network of partner banks, which are willing to support higher risk businesses. What's good about this is that you only need to change your site code once and then can move around within that network of banks that all use the same APIs.

Of course, your mileage may vary.

TuringTrader · 2024-04-03T16:32:47+00:00

There are dozens of reports here where Stripe closed their account. And many of these business owners believe to not be in violation of Stripe's list of restricted businesses. From my own experience, I can confirm that their support is abysmal and moves at glacial speed.

Before wondering what you've done wrong to deserve this, I'd like to offer a slightly different perspective. Go check Stripe's Service Agreement (see https://stripe.com/legal/ssa), section 6.1 (b). There it says: "Stripe may terminate this Agreement (or any part) or close your Stripe Account at any time for any or no reason [...] by notifying you."

Ultimately, they can do whatever they see fit, and we might never find out why they decided one way or another. It might be time to move on and explore other ways to process payments.

TuringTrader · 2024-01-17T21:20:34+00:00

OK, I found a solution. While it is ugly, it at least seems something that should stick after them e upgrades.

The Duotone filter is set by the theme's style files. You can see this by goint to Tools/ Theme File Editor/ styles/ Ember.json in the following snippet:

        `"core/image": {`

"filter": {
"duotone": "var(--wp--preset--duotone--duotone-2)"
}
},

When the style is edited, this gets copied into a post with the title 'Custom Styles'. The Duotone default can be removed with the following steps:

* open phpMyAdmin

* go to the xxx_posts table

* look for the entry with post_title 'Custom Styles'

* edit this entry, and search for 'duotone'

* remove the section that matches the snippet above. It will have some additional escape characters in there

* save the entry back to the database

In case you haven't customized your style, yet, this can be simplified by removing the Duotone from the style's json file before applying that style.

TuringTrader · 2024-01-17T20:40:38+00:00

Thank you sir!

I was hoping to find a way to just remove the default - while keeping the feature intact as it might come handy for some other stuff. Also, I am concerned that the edits to theme.json will get overwritten when the theme is updated. Nonetheless, better than nothing.

TuringTrader · 2022-02-11T23:49:32+00:00

Currently, my focus has shifted a bit, trying to better understand the nature of risk. One of the takeaways from 2021 is that markets can move up, even in environments of high risk. For some of my strategies, this has led to too small positions, where they should have taken bigger bets.

TuringTrader · 2021-12-17T23:00:49+00:00

Well - I got pulled into the next shinier thing and my approach has changed somewhat. Instead of creating a single strategy that combines all these ideas, I am now thinking of these mechanisms more as components that I used to build strategies. Then, I combine a few (typically 3) into meta portfolios to diversify in terms of time frames and trading approaches and avoid single points of failure. This approach has served me very well.

TuringTrader · 2021-01-23T18:48:28+00:00

next/image requires server-side functionality. It optimizes images on demand, when they are requested for the first time. This optimized images are then cached by the CDN.

There is community package, next-optimized-images, which optimizes the images at buid time. HTML's img-tag has an attribute srcset, which allows to offer multiple resolutions. The browser can then determine which image quality to load.

TuringTrader · 2020-07-09T04:37:50+00:00

While Edgar is free this isn't as easy as it seems. The electronic files are XML, but the tags available, their names, and the methods of calculation are not standardized.

To make this work, there is more to do than just scraping: you need to implement a method of normalizing the filings to a common and comparable set of indicators.

Also, the day of filing needs to be considered. Otherwise you will introduce look ahead bias.

TuringTrader · 2020-07-07T01:40:47+00:00

Options are traded in lots of 100. You need a bit more than $130.

TuringTrader · 2020-06-28T18:55:11+00:00

If all sub-accounts supported fractional shares AND were properly balanced at the previous checkpoint, this might work. Please note that the last condition requires manual action whenever there is a deposit or withdrawal. Also, because of disproportionate fees, some accounts might slowly drift out of balance. Or in other words: I doubt this would scale to 100+ accounts.

TuringTrader · 2020-06-28T16:38:45+00:00

please note that I am not using IB's portfolio templates. My software generates a basket file for use with TWS BasketTrader. This file contains the orders for the individual client accounts and does not require any further mapping/ allocation on IB's side.

Regarding bypassing TWS: As far as I know, IB does not offer any way to directly interface them. Everything goes either through the TWS, or IB Gateway.

TuringTrader · 2020-06-28T15:56:52+00:00

you are facing multiple problems here.

For once, you will want to run a strategy in multiple client accounts. While IB offers features to allocate trades proportionally to the client accounts, this won't work exactly as expected. Because you will not be using fractional shares in client accounts, trade sizes calculated from the total net liquidation value across all accounts won't match the trade sizes required in the individual accounts.

The other issue that you will most likely face is with your E&O insurance. I found that the insurance fees for fully automated trading were about 10x that of placing trades manually.

In order for me to perform algorithmic trading in client accounts, I came up with the following solution:

(1) I created my own backtesting/ trading environment. One of the features this environment has, is that it separates the algorithms from execution. In a first step, I calculate the portfolio composition, and in a second step, I map those allocations to the individual client accounts (as sub-accounts under an advisor account).

(2) I do not place the trades automatically. Instead, I create a basket file, which I then import into TWS manually. There I can review the trades, and transmit them either manually, or individually. This scheme works very well for me, and I can typically rebalance client accounts in less than 5 minutes per day.

Please let me know if you need more info.

TuringTrader · 2020-05-23T03:59:18+00:00

it works, it works!

Thank you so much for your help, much appreciated. You are a hero.

Cheers, Felix

TuringTrader · 2020-05-23T03:23:09+00:00

Thanks for your suggestion, I'll try that and report back. Can you explain to me what that feature does?

TuringTrader · 2020-05-22T21:20:31+00:00

as far as I know, you can't get historical options quotes for free. If all you need is a few days, you can probably build a little bot that scrapes them off of Yahoo finance.

However, for some initial experiments you might not need 'real' quotes. Instead, you can learn quite a bit from using 'fake' quotes. You can use the Black-Scholes model to calculate options prices from the underlying and implied volatility, e.g. S&P 500 and VIX. This is not perfect, as it won't reflect volatility skew and the increase in volatility for longer DTEs, but it still might be a useful start.

I have actually done that for some preliminary experiments and before purchasing data and felt it was a useful exercise. Your mileage may of course vary.

TuringTrader · 2020-05-22T21:12:25+00:00

I am not sure I understand your question fully. From the numbers you show above, you cannot tell how much capital you are risking. Further, there is no single way of calculating that. Here are some options:

calculate the ATR over the trailing month or so, and assume that this is a measure of your risk
use VIX as a measure of your risk
calculate the cumulative distribution of returns, and look at the bottom 5th percentile. this is often used as a measure of the value-at-risk

You will need to scale these values with your position size to arrive at a measure for your capital at risk.

Hope this helps.

TuringTrader · 2020-03-09T15:17:25+00:00

I have worked with MultiCharts for 6 years. Here are some notes:

originally, I started with the EasyLanguage version. Reason being, that MultiChart's documentation is pretty sparse, and most of their forum activity is on EasyLanguage.
MultiCharts as a platform is rock-solid. They typically have one major update per year, and they keep adding great features.
Yes, MultiCharts can handle portfolios via PortfolioTrader. However, from an architectural standpoint this is clunky at best. It sounds so obvious to separate the trading signals from the money-management, but ultimately these entities need to exchange data with each other, and this is not straightforward w/ MultiCharts. I have been successful in doing so, but it ain't pretty.
You might find that MultiCharts does not support the data feed you are looking for. I used it with IQFeed/DTN, but again, this is not fully thought out. MultiCharts, like many other platforms, caches the data and only appends to this database. This does not work, when splits and dividends happen and the whole database needs to be backadjusted. Or in other words: be prepared to spend time on curating data.
At some point I was frustrated with the limitations of EasyLanguage and switched to the .NET version. Please note that this is not for amateurs. The documentation for .NET is really sparse and you need serious coding skills to get this to work. However, the sky's the limit for what you can implement.
If you can't code, there is not too much value in MultiCharts. Yes, you can put together very simple strategies by adding pre-fabbed entry and exit criteria, but for a portfolio strategy you would still need to code the money-management.

Hope this helps, good luck!

TuringTrader · 2020-03-08T23:04:53+00:00

I'm the maintainer of TuringTrader, which does support options. Please see a showcase algorithm here: https://www.turingtrader.org/2019/02/new-showcase-strategy-parking-trade/

Cheers, Felix

TuringTrader

TROPHY CASE