Moral Issues with TradeBolt, Strategy Runner, Multi Charts

[Bogan7]

Quote from ProgrammerGuy:

Please stay away from the debate if small companies are more likely to be unethical vs bigger ones.

I'm interested on the integrity on these 3rd party software distributors

Maybe your handle should be Paranoid guy.

Everyone is out to steal your ideas it is true as these guys arent really software developers who most likely when they get a great product do very well from it but actually are front organisations waiting for unsuspecting traders to give them there golden strats then in no time the frim has closed down and they open up a hedge fund in Berumda.

 

[Bogan7]

Quote from ProgrammerGuy:

Are there small and unethical companies in canada yes, have I backtested them, yes!

How do you backtest being unethical?

 

[francis1]

I think you meant www.TradeBullet.com rather than tradebolt which is a defunct--and unrelated--company.

There is no way TradeBullet can know what your strategy is because it runs locally on your computer and you connect directly to the broker.

Francis

 

[Bob111]

Quote from ProgrammerGuy:

Basically I'm looking for (2) things.
1) To be able to be paid a good interest rate on my EOD cash balance
2) good order executions
3) knowing that I other people won't be able to see my strategies

I've been looking at , www.strategyrunner.com, www.tradebolt.com, and multicharts (3rd party software). Currently I have the Tradebolt website up. My ? is, are these programs chop shops? Will they be able to see your code? The multicharts software company is from Russia. Not like there is anything wrong about Russia, isn't just that I don't want to have to go to Russia to pursue legal action. Also TradeBolt is from Quebec, Canada... WHY NOT IN THE US??


Thanks

since you programmer guy, i hope you realize, that before someone take your "system" code, they must be sure that you are PROFITABLE in first place. in order to get that info they must have access to your account and how is this possible for charting software?i'm missing something?
brokerage company, for example can do this to their customers,who having stable profits,but it's a broker, not charting software.

 

[naifwonder]

I understand where you are coming from being that I tend to go overboard on security myself. To test that my software was not distributing my strategies, I checked the outgoing and inbound connections to my internet connection. I then loaded up my software and checked the connections to check for anything fishy. After that, I loaded up the strategies and checked once again for anything suspicious. This process should be repeated at random times.

Although I highly doubt that your software would be distributing your strategy without you knowing it, the method above might be one good way to ensure that it is not. Also, you can check the user agreement and disclaimer for your software for anything suspicious.

 

[Bob111]

Quote from naifwonder:

I understand where you are coming from being that I tend to go overboard on security myself. To test that my software was not distributing my strategies, I checked the outgoing and inbound connections to my internet connection. I then loaded up my software and checked the connections to check for anything fishy. After that, I loaded up the strategies and checked once again for anything suspicious. This process should be repeated at random times.

Although I highly doubt that your software would be distributing your strategy without you knowing it, the method above might be one good way to ensure that it is not. Also, you can check the user agreement and disclaimer for your software for anything suspicious.

good idea,but if you re super paranoind and have programming skills threre is another solution-make your own software. takes time, but hey! after that- only 2 guys to go-broker and hacker

 

[naifwonder]

Developing a charting, development and execution platform for security purposes would be overkill for me. However, I am working on my own system development platform for functionality purposes

 

[maxpi]

I thought about this security thing and emailed a guy that wrote Qcharts about it at one point. He recommended unbundling the brokerage from the software. I guess he was suggesting that a programmer could easily write a back door in some trading software to check your account and steal your intellectual property. Programmers do those very things, a couple guys were found to have put back doors in banking software, well documented case actually.

I have spoken to various people in my near-field and they immediately jump to the "paranoiac" thing, I'm being logical and assuming that somebody will try to steal my intellectual property just to be on the cautious side. I did work up a great system for complete security but I'm not sharing it here and I don't have it yet, it is costly to implement. I have shared the idea with a friend that is very computer savvy and he was surprised at the simplicity and effectiveness, I might lease them later on....

I would recommend a completely separate computer for trading, I have one for surfing, not worried about the security much at all, and one for trading. People have reported here that if they have one computer for trading that they can run it for years with no firewall or antivirus and never have a problem.

I would recommend a hardware firewall for the trading computer, configure it so it allows only the url's necessary for trading in or out, then add zone alarm or something that recognizes when software is phoning home and block it if you think you can run your trading without it calling in. On the cheap and simple, that is going to be pretty effective.

If your trading software can access your brokerage account then you have to not let it phone home essentially. You are stuck with the fact that somebody in your brokerage can access your computer and download your intellectual property a few bytes at a time over a long period and there is little you can do about it IMO but the hacker would have to be inside the brokerage, and using their computers and network to do that, seems a bit dicey for said hacker and hopefully a savvy brokerage would be on the lookout for such activity because were it discovered by clients it would cost the brokerage hugely in terms of trust and image.

I would not make the decision based on "Canadians are ethical", I'm laughing pretty good at that one.......

 

[malaka56]

You could set up something like IPCop or an OpenBSD packet filter on a separate computer and have it firewall/block packets which do not conform to FIX protocol, or whatever you use for limits, markets, other order types, etc. I imagine a backdoor would send data to a different server or at least a different port on the server (unless the company itself authorized it) to "steal" the strategy, so by severely restricting where your packets are sent, length, headers, etc, would be fairly secure.
Other than that, you would just have to have your isolated automated system send signals to another trusted computer, which would then have software to generate clean packets.

None of this seems really worthwhile to me, quite over the top, but you never know I guess...
I would be flattered if someone stole my strategies.

EDIT: Have signals generate an automatic email to a firm in India who manually enter your orders. Quite secure. Ha.

 

[laputa]

What you can do is to move key functions or incoporate security functions into a DLL file. It is very easy to do with tradestation and multi chart.

That way they don't know what you're doing even if they get your EasyLanguage or "PowerLanguage" code

I think it is an absolute must do. There are boutique hedge funds that use retail stuffs like tradestation or maybe multi chart for their research and spent millions along the process. The incentive is definitely there to send over code whenever the software detects a very profitable backtesting result that passes certain preset critieria