A cautionary tale for system developers

Quote from crisis?crisis:

Who died and made you Judge Judy. :)

I'm not sure what you are ruling on or, quite frankly, what you are talking about. Are you under the impression that we were trying to sell something?

Jerry offered to help us out, but ended up just wasting a bunch of our time and then accusing us of trying to steal his code.

I'm only posting here to try to defend myself from Jerry's ludicrous accusations. I am not trying to sell anything, I'm not trying to buy anything, and I'm not trying to steal anything. I'm the victim here.

Tradescript from Modulus does indeed have an API. I don't know if that is where you downloaded the documentation from. We found several bugs in it, but if you work around those, you can write some pretty complex scripts.

Since everyone keeps harping on "encrypted", I searched through Jerry's emails and I didn't find the word. Perhaps he misspelled it. That doesn't seem to be his forte. The ActiveX idea was just one option after he reneged on sending us signals via email. All we wanted was to see if he could send us signals that we could plug into our trading system for winning trades. We never saw that he could provide that.
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Mr. Crisis,

Try reading the email I sent you on 2/19/08 at 1:12 PM

To quote myself:

"In terms of sending you an ActiveX, we would need legal and financial agreements in place for that. There would be significant up front expenses that I'd require from <snip name of corporation> in advance. Specifically I need to hire a programmer to convert the data transformation, model execution and signal generation parts of my system into C++ and then encrypt the whole package so that it remains proprietary."

In this context encrypt and encypted have the same meaning.

Jerry030
 
Quote from syswizard:

Well, looking at all of the facts and information here, I would judge against Crisis here. The main reason being:
Tradescript is inherently "open source"....and there is no opportunity at this time in it's current release to build a system using a link to a DLL (which would make it "closed source").
In other words, any system would be "fully disclosed" by nature of the scripting platform.

However, I would warn Jerry that he should have done his due diligence (AS I DID - it took all of 10 minutes time to download the Tradescript docs !) and just stayed away from this offer. Since Jerry mentioned encryption when in fact, this was not even an option with Tradescript, that tells me he DID NO DUE DILIGENCE.

Further comments: Tradescript is nice ! Beautiful architecture, highly efficient being written in C++, and very portable. Well done.
HOWEVER, it has a long, long, LONG way to go to get even close to Tradestation's Easy Language in terms of power and functionality. They really need a DLL interface as well as a script encryption facility before this can become mainstream. It's a nice start though.
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You are correct in terms of my due dilligence. I was never told development base for their platform and didn't ask. Had the pjoject proceeded that would have come up for consideration in due course.
 
Quote from Jerry030:

Mr. Crisis,

Try reading the email I sent you on 2/19/08 at 1:12 PM

To quote myself:

"In terms of sending you an ActiveX, we would need legal and financial agreements in place for that. There would be significant up front expenses that I'd require from <snip name of corporation> in advance. Specifically I need to hire a programmer to convert the data transformation, model execution and signal generation parts of my system into C++ and then encrypt the whole package so that it remains proprietary."

In this context encrypt and encypted have the same meaning.

Jerry030
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Ah, you know what the problem was? When I got to the point of "...significant up front expenses that I'd require from you in advance..." I stopped reading since I figured you were just trying to scam us.

My boss had been after me to cut you loose long before I actually did. That was the last straw. Did you really expect us to pay for something sight unseen? All we had was a spreadsheet that had these 15 minute signals that you couldn't explain since you had said your model couldn't do 15 minute bars without more upfront expenses.

And you accuse us of being unscrupulous? Take a look in the mirror dear sir.
 
Quote from crisis?crisis:

Ah, you know what the problem was? When I got to the point of "...significant up front expenses that I'd require from you in advance..." I stopped reading since I figured you were just trying to scam us.

My boss had been after me to cut you loose long before I actually did. That was the last straw. Did you really expect us to pay for something sight unseen? All we had was a spreadsheet that had these 15 minute signals that you couldn't explain since you had said your model couldn't do 15 minute bars without more upfront expenses.

And you accuse us of being unscrupulous? Take a look in the mirror dear sir.
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You did find my email then with the word encrypt? Your "story" transmutes itself with amazing speed!
 
Quote from Jerry030:

You did find my email then with the word encrypt? Your "story" transmutes itself with amazing speed!
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Well, I had searched for "encrypted", so actually my story remains the same.

However, I did just read that email. Like I said, I stopped reading that paragraph (my eyes were tearing over from laughing), so I didn't see a few lines further down where you said "I'd estimate your up front cost to have my stuff running on your system would be at least $10,000." Holy cow, on that spreadsheet, your net profit for the whole year was $11,000. Good thing I didn't see that the first time, my message telling you we no longer required your services might have been somewhat less cordial.

As usual, you ducked the question once again. How is it that you were able to come up with 15-minute signals in that spreadsheet when you claim that it would take significant modifications to your model to do 15-minute bars?

Your story just doesn't hold water.
 
Quote from crisis?crisis:


As usual, you ducked the question once again. How is it that you were able to come up with 15-minute signals in that spreadsheet when you claim that it would take significant modifications to your model to do 15-minute bars?

Your story just doesn't hold water.
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It's the difference between back testing on historical data in a flat file and live signal generation from a live price feed, transforming those prices with some very complex math, feeding the new file into a neural network modeling application which has to load a large number of saved models, getting the model outputs and running the prediction variables, which vary between 0 and 1, into another application to generate an entry signal and then get the signal communicated in time to trade 15 minute bars.

In a simple rule based system with a few price derived technical indicators and a few dozen rules this may take much less than a second as it's all done within the application that is monitoring the live price feed.

However when you move from simple linear logic to complex non-linear applications like neural networks, Fuzzy systems and many others there is substantial computational overhead as you may have to invoke multiple applications and fetch or transform large files like saved models.

I know this is way over your head technically, so don’t feel frustrated if you still don’t understand.

Those following this thread who have actually developed predictive models know what’s involved in sophisticated application development.
 
Quote from Jerry030:

I know this is way over your head technically, so don’t feel frustrated if you still don’t understand.
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Ugh, if I may offer you one word of advice. One of the main reasons we passed on your services was your constant stream of condescending emails. This and your inability to answer a direct question made it extremely difficult for us to work with you.

We aren't looking to drum up any business on this forum, but you are. Your potential clients might see from this thread how difficult you are to work with. They may also wonder if they might be the subject of the next thread accusing them of being thieves, murderers, and rapists.

I wouldn't have wasted any more time on this if I hadn't felt strongly that being falsely accused of something required a response.

I will check back now and again to see if we have been defamed. I wish I could say it has been a pleasure, but this forum has been a complete nightmare.
 
Quote from crisis?crisis:

They may also wonder if they might be the subject of the next thread accusing them of being thieves, murderers, and rapists.
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I doubt anyone committing a felony or sexual assault is likely to provide any evidence about it on this forum or via email.

Anyone having evidence of such a crime should contact the FBI instead of discussing it here.
 
<img src=http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys/forum/popcorn.gif>

Some decent drama here, it's got potential...but personally I'd prefer to see a bit <b>less</b> civility, and a bit more liberal use of phrases like; "pillow biting, gerbil stuffing cocksucker!"

Thank you for your consideration. <img src=http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys/forum/popcorn.gif>
 
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