When it comes to money matters you got to be tough, straightforward and practical, I do not think ET folks are any hard than needs to be in trading. Also, I would doubt if any hedge fund would dole out more than $25K for any top notch system while signing NDA and other strings. Your decision to go the hedge fund route should be more profitable. A good product catches its own following. By the way if someone visited the collective2.com site where they track and evaluate various system, we find that most of the systems have lacklusture performance...........does this mean good traders have not posted their deals on collective2? There is a saying in trading........those who know don't sell and those who sell don't know (not aimed to you McHugh). Proflogic was one good example, bastard would not even trade on paper in real time let alone have any real time real money history.
I hear you, TOC. My comment wasn't directed at you. I'm not naive. But when someone offers their opinion on a computer/technical type question, I don't think they should be attacked or ridiculed. Everyone has their own opinion, and disagreement is fine, but ridicule is childish. The egocentric, "mine is bigger than yours" mentality that pervades this site is probably the same cause of a lot of trader losses and anguish, which leads to more blowhard comments and its a vicious cycle people need to be wary of. There's nothing wrong with a little humbleness - it helps in trading too. But, yeah, after weighing this decision for a couple months, I'm definitely going to keep these things to myself and make the most I can out of them before they go obsolete. Have a good one.
Trade Secret is the applicable terminology in these situations. Only the inventors of the system need to know the details. The signals can be generated from a secure system - as others have said - and published to people or other systems in order to execute the trades. Unless the system is transparent it will be very difficult to determine exactly how it functions even if you have access to all of the generated signals. You can still have employees trading the strategy ... just feed them trade signals in a certain sector or set of markets to make it eve more unlikely that they would determine the details .....
Didn't you read the amazing revelation that "geeks" can "crack" these signals! Anyway, to answer my question above -the correct crack is to buy at the same price that my "system" does and to sell at the same price that my "system" does. There are so many possible inputs that it's, say we shall, reckless for anyone to invest the salary of geeks in cracking it - it's far more economical to pay to x% for the signals. e.g. Let's suppose I have a system for Corn Futures. - and that "geeks" are trying to "crack" it. How do they know I'm not taking signals from the geiger counter in my back yard?
I am sure that there is someone, somwhere sitting in a windowless closet working on it right now .......
... and thus I am sure you are working on something more than simply deciphering the output of someone elses trading system design ...... ... my closet sized office also has windows ...
EXACTLY! But the paranoid will always be paranoid. Anyway, have to enter a darkened room with a dozen corn futures trades and reverse-engineer a system. My boss says we could split the proceeds 50/50 with someone else - but hey! why take the risk