I've got 10 years .NET experience and am used to high performance handling of tick data. Don't bother with NT. Hopeless platform. Daily rate: £1500/$2000 (I drink a lot of beer) PM me if interested.
Question. If a project was estimated to take 40hrs. at what point (Hour) could a programmer determine if the customers strategy was a loser?
When you are charging by the hour I would estimate it would take AT LEAST another 40 hours to determine you are dealing with a loser . Problem is, you (the client) may not have any money left to trade with even if it turns out to be a good strategy. Advice: limit the number mouths you feed and do the testing and programming yourself. As an example, SierraChart is pretty solid and easy to learn. They have a custom language or you can enter rules in a worksheet. There are also plenty of free coding examples to learn from and a forum to answer questions along the way. I have traded an ATS on sierra since 2009 and it was my first. Haven't had many problems since and just constantly looking for ways to improve on it. If you deal with an outside programmer and something too customized you are at their mercy for fixes and tweaking.
Ideally, though common sense tells me that it is folly to blindly follow this aphorism. I should explain. I have steady work now, but I make about 1/7 of your daily rate every day. If someone decided to hire you, for every day that you work, it will take me seven to catch up. Does this mean the people who are paying me are not receiving as much? I doubt it, but I have no way to know, as this depends on character and skill, and I have way past interactions here to ascertain either about you. As it stands, I have less money to spend on beer than you do, but I assure you that I enjoy mine greatly.
Assuming here that the strategy is reasonably complex (which I imagine it would be if you want to simultaneously process intraday data from 100's of equities) I would take 40 hours (5 days) just to spec out the scope of the project and architect a solid solution. This would be before I wrote a single line of code. Evaluation of strategy performance is not up to me. I have no idea what your criteria are for a viable strategy. I would supply you with a set of software libraries which could be plugged into any .NET compatible backtesting engine. That way you'd be able to perform your own tests without having to involve me (and incur the associated costs).
Wise words and good advice. If the OP has a limited budget then their time and money is much better spent in developing their own skills and experience. Buying in good skills and decent experience in this industry is not cheap.