I am forming an LLC, building a website, etc. to start licensing my tech and offering consulting services. The funny thing is just a few days ago I was considering getting a "day job" and continue using my tech for personal use while building a trading track record. The latter will still happen (trading and building a track record) but some "quant" related opportunities have presented themselves that could result in a steady paycheck.
I am abandoning the project of building a FasterQuant integration to NinjaTrader. The problem I ran into is the NinjaTrader Strategies tab which has all of the strategies for live trading stores the strategy collection info in a SQL compact database. In other words, it might be impossible to build the strategy collection via code as can easily be done in AlgoTerminal. Also, each strategy has to be added to the NinjaTrader Strategies tab each time per symbol traded. Right now I am trading 65 strategies with most of them having 3 symbols each. In that case, the user would have to add by hand close to 200 strategy entries on the Strategies tab. The good news is my first customer is willing to switch to AlgoTerminal.
Meeting with my first potential customer this Saturday to get him setup with a trial version of FasterQuant. As previously discussed, he is getting charged the "early adopter" rate of $3,000. Once I go live with the website March 15th the price will be $4999 which will include 40 hours of training and custom development. I am pretty much code complete now for the initial release. Just need to create documentation and tutorial videos.
I strongly recommend you to pay a lot of attention how you obfuscate your code base. Unless you can provide a minimum 1-3 years of track record on a live account it is very hard to comprehend why someone would shell out 3k for an unproven methodology unless of course they were after your code base. Omit if you run your "secret sauce" on a server and only expose client libraries to your potential customer. I remember we chatted a while ago and I could not decipher any of your risk numbers. Without solid risk stats it's very hard to judge whether a model is highly optimized towards the bias of specific input variables or market data or not. Just sharing a suggestion. Edit : I do understand that 3k is relative to everyone. I just purchased a Mellanox SN2700 switch that costs close to 30k so 3k investment is a relatively manageable number for some and yet, I personally would never buy into something regardless of cost without precisely knowing what I am getting out of an investment. Do you have your risk stats in place now and would you mind sharing them on a sample strategy along with performance figures over a minimum 5 year backtest timeframe?
The SDK and Licensing components will of course be obfuscated. Other than that, full source code will be provided. I am not selling my exact methodology (how I use the software) or the set of strategies I am trading but rather automation tools with a deep integration to AlgoTerminal. Someone could take my app and SDK and adapt it to whatever methodology they are using for testing with the expectation of it helping to automate the process. Really, I am using the product offering to position myself as an AlgoTerminal "expert". AlgoTerminal has already asked if I am available for contract work and I have a solid lead on an FX fund that is transitioning from MetaTrader to AlgoTerminal. Do a search for "AlgoTerminal consultant" and you will find nothing. Attached are the results of the portfolio of 65 strategies I am currently trading. Results are compounded so the total return metrics are unrealistic as capacity issues would be encountered in the real world. The Sharpe ratio seems rather low and does not match the number I am coming up (which is closer to 2). So far I am up about 9% this year in my live account and live results match the backtest. Thanks for posting!
It makes a lot of sense how you explained your potential fit in the consulting niche for a specific software vendor. If you were essentially selling strategies or a strategy repository or novel way of developing and testing strategies a lot more information would be necessary to provide to potential customers but as you described you aim to offer consulting services to get clients started with a specific platform. That makes a lot more sense.
Thanks. Happy to hear you think the plan is sound given your background. I was actually mentally preparing to get a "day job" before the AlgoTerminal consulting opportunities started appearing. The FasterQuant website will be launched mid March and I will be very curious to see the interest in FasterQuant vs just consulting work in AlgoTerminal.
Still on track to release next weekend. The trial is going to ship with one minute ES, NQ, and YM data going to back to the late 90's (in the case of ES and NQ) and the data source will be pre-built in AlgoTerminal. Users will get the package, be able to run some pre-built configurations and easily integrate with AlgoTerminal.