They do exist but paying them isn't the hardest part. The hardest part is actually finding them and then building an efficient team. Replacing 3 guys who really know their stuff with 30 monkeys doesn't work. Well, it works for winning political battles (works quite well actually) but not for getting a product out on the trading floor. I've seen this happen firsthand in several places. It was actually quite amazing to witness a mob of technological imbeciles trying to solve a problem hopelessly beyond the reach of their cumulative expertise. In this space, a good coder isn't a good coder until he gains domain expertise (business) on top of his ostensibly superior tech skills. Finding someone who is an excellent programmer and a designer, a systems expert (and you do have to be one once you start dealing with complexities far beyond the scope of your sad quad core CPU) and who has a deep understanding of trading business and exchange mechanics is a serious challenge. But if you are lucky enough to find three guys who have these skills, you can implement just about anything and you can do it fast. /Wulfrede
If I have it right most vendors of trading software make their money from the order transmission and because of this the best model is to offer it for free. This may also be the rational behind open source platforms and the reason they are pushed hard in forums.
Some software platforms own their own routes to the exchange (DMA), some don't. Yes, if they own their routes and you do enough business, they "might" credit your platform fee. It is unlikely this vendor is a broker dealer with that set up. 1245
When I saw this, I thought we had been talking about designing trading software to trade ourselves, not for letting newbies tinker. On MC, it's state of the art if you got data. Custom coding beyond that usually DLL's to reuters or bloomberg or some FIX- protocol API reading a custom newswire which is not something MC can do. The NT charge a half cent for using our stuff model doesn't fly with me, and not having workspaces or portfolio simulations makes that software useless. Anyway, I don't think I'm ever going to use anything other than MC for my business, so trying to beat the tradestation easylanguage platform was as easy as making it possible to trade with somebody other than tradestation.
Selling software and services is smart. Be like Levi's and sell the tools to the speculators. I'm in the HFT biz, and man do we pay out the hizzle for shizzle. I can't say that I haven't thought about an exit strategy of starting my own software consulting firm a few times. Who's richer stevie cohen or mike bloomberg?