It all depends. If they are scalping and they do it to 100 clients it worths it. Anyway, when I was front ran I was trading 100 contracts a shot for a firm in currency futures. The SPY was just an example of the process.
Do you have clients that sophisticated to trade signals off a black-box? If you have enough money to spend you should get TSL from Mike Barna. It will configure automatically for you trading systems and generate code. It will cost you less than a developer and you will have no legal issues to resolve. This is my favorite tool but a bit expensive. Another one that is a lot cheaper is APS by Mike Harris. Limited to price patterns but its p-Indicator and scan functions can serve as a good position trading black-box. It also generates code for use with different platforms for both position and intraday systems.
Some do. But most I find to look to others to raise the necessary capital so they may go about their business of trading and or developing.
I fail to understand how this discussion went south so fast. It appears the main issue as always here is IP and how everyone has been burnt. Well what did you all learn from these burns? Obfusticating your code, maintining off-site user servers? The road goes both ways here. All I know is if you all don't want to do the work I would happily do it.