The existing software is really good. The days where anything new would find a market are behind us. Lots of the new software I see is hardly better than Tradestation 2000 was thirteen years ago.
It's probably a growth issue. Clearly from a growth perspective, the social media/mobile app crap is more attractive. In the online trading world , growth is simply not very attractive. VC's want huge growth potential and also they are sheeps as many other investors, they follow trends. In the software world it's very much a matter of having the right product at the right time IMHO of non techie, a promising sector becomes quickly populated with me-too players and prices collapse, see how much free stuff there is around for trading.
Linda Raschke bought Photon Trader long time, never cared to market it even though it is in constant development. I guess, she is capitalized well enough. And for my needs I did not see anything better on retail market. Split feeds for execution and display work brilliant. Different strokes..
Openquant brought event-driven structure to the writing of scripts for trading that cannot be beat. They also have tick by tick testing that implements the entire FIX protocol and Simulated Annealing for speeding up large optimizations. Ninjatrader brought documentation that includes code examples for every function they have. Sierrachart brought customer service that is unparalleled. They fix bugs in a matter of a day or two and the fixes never break anything else. AMIBroker brought speed. The entire app runs in the processor cache. It can process things far faster than imaginable. Tradestation brought a great grid app and wonderful convenience and esthetics. Copy a list of stock symbols from Excel and paste them into Radarscreen and you are up and running with a thousand new symbols in a matter of seconds. Click on a symbol and you have a great looking chart immediately. If somebody brings a new product that does all of that it will be able to find a market.
why are they coming to you? and why do you have to teach them? Anyways, give me a phone and simple chart and I could trade all day long. People seem to have lost sight of what trading is all about imho.
My friend who works in IT told me once that trading software business is in trouble because of open source source software, free software from brokers and exponential growth of piracy. David Aronson is giving away his tssb software for free and hopes to make money from users that require support. I am sure if he could sell it he would. On top of this I think the number of retail traders with money to spend on software is only a fraction of what was in late 1990s. Developing and marketing trading software is probably one of the worse business one can get involve with at this point.
jeeze, I think all a piece of software needs to do to sell well is help you make money that you can't make using anything else. easy right?
As a retail option trader myself, I already have access to a trading platform (thinkorswim) that was built from the ground up specifically for that...and it's free! No need for me to pay for a platform. As mentioned in this thread, retail is catching on to what makes real money and what doesn't, so, in my opinion, it's getting harder to sell trading software that does not have validation that it will make money for someone at a greater rate (chance or more edge) than the free stuff.
I get your point, but at some future date, you may no longer view the TOS software as free. By all accounts, it's quite adequate and maybe even quite good, but once you start trading more frequently and/or trading larger positions, you'll find that it might be costing you several hundred dollars a month or more in excess commissions.