I would gladly pay a salary for no equity but am afraid the programmer would just try to figure out a way to steal the strategies for the bigger chunk for himself regardless. Would rather have everyone happy from the beginning.
Would gladly pay salary - offered profit sharing as bigger incentive for programmer. More money will be in the back end than whatever $50 an hour salary would pay.
Guys I've said enough in this thread. I have access through the prop firm I work for to a lot of capital. I personally use 5 million EUR and 7.5 million USD to trade everyday. I want to automate and scale some of my strategies and make use of all the resources I have access to. I have no clue how to code and feel it would take too long for me to learn and start from scratch, and I have no problems sharing with someone who works with me. If anyone is seriously interested in this please PM me about it.
Good luck finding a competent developer who isn't going to laugh at $50/hr. If that's your salary offer, I can only imagine how awful the profit sharing offer would be. I have no doubt you'll find someone to take your offer, but you get what you pay for and competent devs know they're worth far in excess of that. You'll also need to worry about them thinking you're screwing them on the deal and using you just to get your ideas and then implement it themselves.
Here's the thing, at $50/hr it is presumed that the specification is airtight, they will get a coder for that who are given the specification, they give back the code, and if it doesn't work that's the spec writers problem. They don't care about profit share. Profit share only works if one party has more knowledge than the other by 80/20, at 50/50 it's a jv, and 20/80 well that just won't happen as the coder wouldn't take the work. Richard Dennis, did profit share, multi-nationals with enterprise services do profit share, use a methodology which has the option of profit share. The people work with only start talking strategy at €400/hr, all their algos and quants under that level are coders, programmers, developers who are technology biased, they might point out some flaws but it's your problem to fix the flow on a strategy level. Most normal people will create a proof of concept and show guideline results, it's standard development practice with anyone who has semi-sensible capital of $100,000s and above, a prop firm would definitely know this unless they are just stupid. This is a simple 20/80 being marketed as an 80/20, nothing more, nothing less. The number of "I will make 400%/yr if you code this for me", "I will provide you profit share as I trade $millions but can only afford $50/hr". The pyramiding has gone berserk, as Einstein said ...
You need someone that can design the architecture and pull the strings. The programming is easy and can be easily outsourced to cheap developers from India, Vietnam, Philippines and other low cost countries. Application should preferable be based on microservices architecture with clean API's between services, that allows for rapid and cheap development. The programmers writing individual parts does not need domain knowledge or have knowledge of full application. They just write their small part so it performs according to specification (input API, output API, API latency time)