Quote from maxpi:
If a broker wanted to look at all my trades they could reverse engineer my strategies.... what I would really hate is if I encoded all I know in an autotrading scheme and somebody got ahold of it. That represents a third of a lifetime's work.. there is nothing new in there but still... letting some hacker get ahold of that is not an option for me... I'd definitely want to find them and cut off their head and stick my bowie knife with my initials on it up their backside and just call the cops and tell them it was worth it... that is one reason I'm not quite autotrading yet... I go a little mad just thinking how they are waiting to do that..
Good brokers are going to have a tight firewall to protect themselves and their clients.. these firewalls are called "pinhole" firewalls, the only way something goes through that, is that a form is presented with all the blanks filled in properly and then the data goes through.. to autotrade you have to give your broker a connection but it's hard for some jerk working there to upload anything not officially included in the firewall spec... that is good... but they could download spyware to your machine along with an install for example and upload to another site.. so what you do is you get a whitelisting firewall and use trading software that does not need to phone home for anything, license check, upgrades, none of that shit... then you only need one url in your whitelist, that of your broker, and pick a professional one with a pinhole firewall... at that point you are reasonably secure.. stuck with brokerage data to trade with but secure...
If some really unreasonable and powerful people wanted your stuff at that point they could force your internet provider to allow them to spoof your broker and they would get your intellectual property.. or they could do that from an internet node even, the DNS servers were shown to be open to spoofing last year... There is no firewall or software solution to that one.. with some hardware you can have a one way internet connection in a sense.. it's doable.. and one way data provision too, all doable, all a big and expensive hardware design problem afaik but doable... if I had some astoundingly new and powerful ideas I would not utter them aloud, I would not make note of them, and I would not deploy them until I had the airtight computer setup and some capable mercenaries guarding even that.. I'm not kidding for a minute here, look at what Wall Street has done over the years in conjunction with the politicians.. thinking they would not steal your intellectual property is purest of folly... going after them with the Bowie Knife when they try.. ahhhh, pure satisfaction... I'd love to say to the judge "yeah, that's my Bowie Knife. It has my initials on it.. where exactly did you guys find it again?" :eek:
