I'll PM you for his address, because they neglected to put one on the site, and the feedback form has the same error. --segv
Excellent question. I think if you are a small software provider you can create a sustainable business. You'll need that community to happen for the business to grow beyond that because like the 3D software world I came from, many more people can use plug-ins/code/scripts from other people than can generally create those same items. In the 3D software world, we noted that most people could not create complex 3D models (think: people, highly detailed cars, etc.), but they could animate them (move them around the space). I think the same applies in the system trading space. So if you want to be successful, you need to: - Be small and agile. - Develop a community (inside trick: create incentives for them) that can develop code. - Have both a good underlying framework for developers and easy plug-and-play for the rest of the community.
It failed for me on a new user creation (forums and support form work fine). I sent them an email letting them know. Apparently the web site is a beta too.
Data over FIX is slow and very inefficient way of doing things. No one wants to take their low latency feed and put it through a FIX adapter. FIX used for order messaging is fine.
You actually said "Well, it's designed around FIX standards, including business object layer" My original point was that your platfrorm does not directly hook up to any of the pro-feeds.
I think you are right in your assessment that the retail market for such a product is relatively small. That is what the costs of the other software packages is telling us. We sold our small 3D software package for $795 (1992 dollars), and managed on building a good business turning around $6-7m in revenue a year. This supported a small staff of about 10 people. I guess my point is that you could build a sustainable business - we were around for around 7 years before we got bought out - these were also the days before VC was very big - so you built your business brick by brick. But there are also trends in software that you need to worry about when you charge, say $500-1000 for a software package. Both of which I experienced while working at the 3D company. 1. Entrance of a large, well-funded competitor. We had Autodesk enter our space - they didn't stay there, but while they were their, they significantly impacted our sales. 2. Another small software company in the same space "blinks". In this case, we had another competitor who was priced similar to us, and they lowered their price to $79. So we were stuck in the middle. The first sign I've seen of #2 is NeedforTrade.com. There are also a few open source efforts as well. But there is also the inherit barrier created by the cost of data - so there are certain fixed costs that may turn off the retail buyer. If IB bought one of these companies, I would consider #1 has happened. Charts were the first thing to become commodified - will system trading come next?
Charts are easy and cheap to produce. Professional level automated trading is neither easy to do nor cheap to run. Hence it will never become freely available in the way charts are. However, I would expect there to be an ever growing number of automated platforms aimed at the retail market simply because it is a excellent way for brokers to generate commission revenue.
droskill, Thanks for the reply. Your posts have been helpful and insightful. Can you please elaborate on what RE can't currently do for you? I admit that my needs are quite plain vanilla. That may change at some point, though (particularly as I'm now learning to program in C#), so I'd like to see what others feel are RE's shortcomings. Thanks, polr
Richard, How many securities do you have in your watch list for your auto-trading with WL? I happen to think that Wealth-Lab Developer is a marvel of a product...it's easy to use; it's *somewhat* robust; it has *nearly* all the features I could ever want; the online forum is generally pretty useful; and it can plug into any data feed or execution platform that I'd ever want to use (though this last part would require the assistance of a programmer with skills beyond my own). The problem with it is that it isn't robust enough. I can't have a watch list of 10k securities (with roughly 6k live at any given moment in the day). I do think that WLD is close to being the perfect design/backtest/automation platform on the market (aside from the issues mentioned above as well as the fact that I'd have to have a buddy from outside the US purchase it for me). polr