Yeah, it would take some creativity (and legal work) to make sure everyone had skin in the game...and to manage people joining/leaving the group. Will noodle on it a bit...
This seems to be another thread similar to " Anyone know of a no capital contribution required firm". Everyone wants something for nothing. You complain that data prices are so high but want a prop firm to pay for it. What do they get in return? Potentially some of your profits and all of your losses! Great deal for them. And if you do find a profitable strategy you would just leave and trade it yourself. So for the prop firm in your scenario it is lose/lose. You lose money they eat 100% of it. You make money and they take maybe 50% for a couple months and then you trade the strategy somewhere else. And during this whole time they are paying for data, servers, programming costs, etc. Trading is a business. I am totally convinced that people looking for free handouts have no confidence in their trading ability and are looking for some sucker to back them. Apparently backing of traders used to happen when trading was a little easier and traders made money with little effort. Now those same traders can't make a dime so they want someone else to shoulder the loss. Good luck. Please keep us posted on what you find.
I was trading for a while and doing incubator/start-ups for traders. 100% backing profitable guys. It's very easy and straightforward. You back something you would trade yourself. There just needs to be full disclosure on strategy, backtesting, etc. We worked with quite a few profitable guys. I'm not looking to trade or get back involved in trading. I was just curious if any firms offer reliable data to traders. We used to offer reliable data to anyone - but it never left our servers. From there they would backtest and optimize and if the numbers looked good we would turn it on. If the data is good and the historicals are accurate then it's not hard. That's all I'm really interested in is facilitating, not trading and probably not backing. If I were to back again I'd do a salary with a draw and put traders as direct employees rather than a prop model.
Just to be clear, I have no interest in gaining access to (or sharing) capital or strategies. What I'm not happy with is my data and technology. The motivation behind forming a group would be to share the costs of implementing and maintaining proper data/servers/etc...and perhaps a programmer that could build out shared utilities like a data handler or smart router. Also, if 10 guys each trading 3M shares / month came as a package, they could likely negotiate a much better comm rate that reflected 30M / month rather than 3M. Anyhow, just thinking out loud as well. If a guy like Win wanted to offer all this as a service then that would obviously be a much cleaner solution (albeit probably a bit more expensive).
Quite the opposite. Traders in a "capture your own" environment will duplicate and individually spend much more than collectively. It's not looking for something for free, it's just a simple question. Just the sheer cost of hard drives and power can be shared.