How does subscription work? Once a customer has your trading system, what stops them from unsubscribing? Genuine question.
Well, its basically a variety of simple factors and how they interact with each other. I sent emails to a variety of quant funds off their public sites. I didn't get any responses. Yeah I'm willing to give live demos under any market conditions anytime.
Sorry, this wasn’t clear indeed - you subscribe only to trades, without knowing full details of the system. Your account can be setup to be synchronized and execute the same trades as the master/seller/manager account. The managers only describe their general trading style and show their past performance, so most people will subscribe only after a few months or years of the system already running at C2. Some people subscribe to multiple systems to diversify, and to give a chance to newer systems.
If somebody has the code, no matter what he signs or promises: you lose control over your own IP. And it will be impossible to ever get that control back. So if ever it would go wrong, you lost everything and you will never be able to recover your IP.
Put a fine in it, if he does not deliver as promised, he pays you an x amount. There are a lot of coders looking for a trading system because they can not figured it out on their own.
Will try Collective2 and see how it goes. I've have a couple of clients that are buying subscriptions on Ebay. It would be more convenient for people to get the signals or do automatic copy-trading on Collective2. C2 takes a cut of monthly subscription fee so I make more money then my clients pay me directly on Paypal. But the infrastructure and existing customerbase make it worth it. Can charge a higher price to offset the fee's.