FYI - The Nov 08 edition of 'Linux Journal' has a good overview of CUDA & GPU Processing. Its very high level, but worth a read over a cup of coffee. Eric
Here is the link to MB hosting (cant comment on quality of their service): http://www.mbtrading.com/blackBox.asp
Cool. Since it is GPLv3, if I pay for a service, I can get the latest and greatest source code and pass it to my freeloading friends, right ?
Exactly! It sounds like you understand open source. Or do you? By sharing with friends, you're performing "viral marketing"--the most powerful marketing because it works better than anything else and costs the company nothing. In fact, you paid for the privilege. Besides, your friends are not "freeloaders". So, your friends might create addons for all of us or they might decide to signup for service themselves and therefore contribute to future enhancements. Look, I apologize for using the term "freeloaders". It was wrong and I'm sorry. It will never happen again. The reality is that people are to be admired who have friends who care about them enough to share such great software. Sincerely, Wayne
Okay. It's a little more effort to do the video and I'm out of time. So it will be Friday or Saturday. Thanks for your patience. Wayne
I was mainly responding to the term 'freeloaders'. But the GPL does keep you honest. If your project is not providing value, your project may fork like Redhat & CentOS.
Your comment here for example is partially true. However, again this is area where my view of open source had to change during the last few days. For example forking without my blessing will only help TickZOOM and be a waste of the "forkers" time. Why? Well it's easy to diff between their new code and TickZOOM to add and enhancements or fixes back into TickZOOM. But one of the big problems with some open source systems is they don't have the staff to adequately test their software. So it has tons of bugs. Users hate to get software where they have to spend alot of time debugging it. The really successful projects these days all use some form of automated testing to resolve that issue. Trouble is those forkers of TickZOOM will have source code but no real good way to test any changes to it other than spending many weeks of time testing it manually. And testing all those calculations is painstaking grunt work. I know, I did it. TickZOOM will have the only automated tests to check everything after any change. Just as an example, when I added streaming, that only took a few hours but when I ran the tests, many of the stats and calculations were broken. It has taken 3 X as long to analyze each test and debug to fix the repercussions--it also force me to refactor the streaming code and do it a different way. Imagine someone with all those bugs and zero way to test them efficiently? The bottom line is that TickZOOM is committed to quality and reliability even above speed. All of that will make the paid service extremely valuable. Even for beta testers, I'm testing everything again myself. I'm actually expecting few bugs but a slew of enhancement requests instead. Sincerely, Wayne
By the way, since forking is a blessing to open source software in many cases, do want to know what will definitely "keep me honest" to provide value? Funding. Pure and simple. As long as funding continues the value will go on. When funding stops, value will stop. Simple. Specifically, open source, without budget for advertising, depends entirely upon referrals. So contact us immediately if you're having any problem with the software and let's get your problem fixed so you can feel comfortable recommending it to others and remaining a paying customer. Sincerely, Wayne
Hi, first of all I want to tell you that I am really looking forward to get my hands on TickZoom. I am greatly disappointed by the shortcomings of Tradestation, NinjaTrader and others. Your project seems to be the first that has the potential to finally solve critical problems in automated trading like FAST tick-by-tick backtesting ... One thing I didn't see in the discussion (I might have missed it) is historical data. The qualtity of historical data is critical to each and every strategy. Do you plan on offering a possibility to download historical tick-by-tick data from a server? I think it would make backtesting a lot easier especially under the aspect of strategy development groups that might be forming as a side effect of your project. If everybody has (the possibility to get) exactly the same data, it is by far easier to find bugs or make enhancements to strategies. Good luck on your project! All the best, Kalle
The simple answer is yes. TickZOOM will provide some data. However, it will do far more than that. First, specifically, about your excellent point. It will be very important, at times, to use the exact same data as TickZOOM. The reason is when you want to report a bug or issue. If you're using some other data, the question can always be, is it the data? or the software? Of course, if necessary you could also upload the data you're using for tech support (myself) to see the error and fix it. Also, TickZOOM encourages users to convert other data to TickZOOM format if they choose. The format is "open" since you can see it in the code. I have a little GUI tool I use for converting the format that I use. You can just modify it to handle the format you want to read, for example. Later we'll explore offering data already in the TickZOOM format and even real time data but to get that data, vendors or exchanges charge fees which we'll have to pass on to users. If things go well, TickZOOM, will become popular enough that venders will offer TickZOOM format directly. For the beta testers, I will give, for free a download of 5 years of USD/JPY Forex data. That way they can start trying it out without worrying about data conversion. One problem with offering back test data is the cost of purchasing it for redistribution. If we buy the data, vendors charge exhorbitant prices when they know you plan to resell or redistribute it. Someone mentioned $12,000 at one point. I haven't looked into it yet. I have quote servers collecting some data, 12 of the currencies. But that data only goes back a few week since the time when I got the execution server working flawlessly, 24/7. Sincerely, Wayne