I agree - Winston is the opposite of anything I see on the IT side. He is an amateur lowball wanker, not a serious & credible corporate knowledge holder/SME to base decisions on.
It's hard to put a price on experience, imo. An expert knowing a particular infrastructure such as IB/TWS/Java with multi threading, and has solid trading experience can easily get $100/hour or more. I'm sure you can find some college student who will do it for less; but you most likely won't get the domain experience that's essential for project success. I think you're best choice is to interview the candidates and develop a feel for how deeply they understand your infrastructure, if they ask good questions, and if they understand what it means to complete the project (i.e. what is the exit/hand-off criteria). Last piece of advice is to get at a reference and talk to a past client. 10k/month, with the relevant experience, is reasonable.
There are HEAPS of programmers out there that went on to become traders, thus putting their skills to good use either for themselves or for a firm. These are the guys that would most understand what we are trying to pay them to do, as they have likely done something similar before. If you are that paranoid about them "sharing" your code then make them sign a legally-binding non-compete agreement. And if you are scared of them using it for their own account, well to be frank, unless they have MEGA bucks (which means they wouldn't want to do a $20-100/hr job in the first place) this shouldn't be a concern. eg. if the strategy is scalable to $100m and you're putting about $20-30m of client money into it, does it really matter if your programmer trades the model with $1-2m of his own money? Or maybe I've missed the point.
if you're a good programmer, have good design skills, and can manage a project, it's really not that crazy. the REAL work is design and quality control. quality control shouldn't be any different if working with a pro or a student. if i could teach a monkey to program, i'd use the monkey... but, luckily, student's are a lot like monkeys.
Programmer from India with expierence in trader software/API's : $2500 / month, working 6 days a week, everything included. I don't know what you guys are talking about, your prices are way above market and it's clear there's a middle man in it taking the profit.
As a programmer who has worked in a variety of situations within finance/trading, I must agree that the key question in efficacy of outsourcing/interning vs professional development is your ability to be the project manager and architect. Consider a task of implementing the back-end for an already written HTML sign-up process. Doesn't sound too bad, Ruby on rails for an hour, pad a second hour to be on the safe side. I bet you could find a dozen jobbers to bid < $100. Of course there is alot more omitted from the description then included: integration with recurring billing service, complex upgrade/downgrade proration policies, general ledger accounting, reporting, ability to handle unplanned promotions/pricing changes, .... Not to mention all of the changes in the original HTML pages once people are really focused on them. A professional knows enough to ask how these follow-on features will be satisfied. A jobber knows that his initial low-ball $100 is a loss leader. At some point the payor will get discouraged and not want to pay for more. How much quality can you expect from someone unsure of being paid at all. No point in reinventing the wheel, there are many open-source solutions supported by consulting firms. You get a bid from Malaysia for $60K. Is that really what it is going to cost you, or are they low-balling and planning to hit-you on the change requests? Meanwhile the bidding process has taken longer than the time budgeted for the whole job (not uncommon.) If your task is really well defined, then why not code it yourself? Usually it is specific knowledge, not time. University students are thirsting for real-world knowledge and want to learn Java and a data vendor API, for example. If you want something that really works though, you need to really walk through the code yourself. How are LME forward markets handled? Is the data being processed in a multi-threaded safe way? Are real-world issues such as outage-filling being handled? Being a project manager/architect means alot more than cracking the whip. I have worked with overseas talent, and I know that no one has a lock on intelligence. So much of getting a good working product is communication, that I found, that even with fluent English, it took 2-3 times as much of my time per employee than for an American worker which negated the cost savings. In my experience, one stops outsourcing at the skeleton stage since explaining the nuances is just too expensive. I have a friend who ditched his entire American programming staff in favor of some East Europeans. They made exactly what he wanted for 1/3 the money. It took alot longer to get it finished than expected. The tail-end, however, didn't end. Everything that he hadn't personally, explicitly tested didn't work. You might think that your US dollars command serious attention overseas, but smart guys want to ramp-up on the next project everywhere. Since then, he has started all over again, but this time with a very small staff of Americans and very careful, detailed oversight. Don't get me started in discussing the short-cuts that jobbers necessarily take to get their low bids. Are you really appreciating that the whole thing may have to be rewritten when you want a little change made? There is also reuse of effort. Did you know that a big piece of the task was scrapping data from a certain website and that your colleague down the hall has some abandoned code for doing it? How about real-time availability? You get the kid down the street to agree to do it for $1/hour, but not when his friends bring their skateboard. You get someone to work after-hours, but you didn't realize he was getting married. In conclusion, if you can't really validate the work yourself, if the project isn't trivially small, or if you aren't really exactly sure what is needed, pay a professional project manager/team to manage the work. After all, it is the result you need.
My comments about programmers who are traders or traders who program is this: They can not ever forget what they learned from you. I've heard horror stories about some of the people in this thread even. There are A LOT of people out there looking to poach decent ideas from people to either get them bogus test results back when the idea actually works - or to turn out a quick job and then they turn the idea on in their accounts too. You have to be very careful that you 100% trust the person you give your ideas to. If not, consider it gone/stolen.
Having non-traders doing your programming doesn't much reduce the likelihood of your trading ideas getting stolen. If some programmer type sees trading ideas that are making buckets of money, you think he is less likely to take them because he wasn't previously interested in trading? This is more dependent on the character and honesty of the programmer. And I can't speak to Java in particular, but I can speak to database programmers. Every project I've been involved in where things were outsourced to another country, management ended up regretting it except one. One out of about 10 times we had success with outsourcing to another country. This is from 6 different companies in the US, so it wasn't like we used the same outsourcing company every time. Yes there are really sharp programmers in places like India, but many of the really sharp ones come to the US to live and work. Me as a programmer/designer could probably outsource some work effectively overseas but it would have to be low level work with me doing all of the design work and asking all the important questions of myself. I wouldn't expect success outsourcing any high level thinking. The one success story was to South America, incidentally.
I am thinking to put my calculation logic in one Java code and the execution logic in another code. Giving each for a different coder. and run/test both on different PCs on different locations. So no coder will have the code of the other. Does this possible? So, when the execution coder work , he will work only on the code of execution and i will have the calculation code on my desktop and on testing could his pc call my pc to send call to other half? Is Java preferable in this regard?
It is possible, and Java is fine in that regard(as would be your other possible coding language choices). Not quite sure what you're visualizing, but I'm guessing you're still ending up with one of the programmers knowing whatever you deem to be worth stealing, they would just then need to program the execution API or whatever themselves.