Quote from putladder:
Blackbox LLC does something like this. But it seems shady because of the laws regarding intellectual property. This is how it was explained to me: the trading system a trader has is his IP. If he gives it to a person like automate or blackbox llc, and they alter it slightly, that now becomes their property. And an non disclosure agreement doesn't help. Just my .002 for FWIW.
This is so true folks. Automate it yourself. I can't program. But I can automate. I wouldn't know C++ code from fortran, or visual basic or whatever else but increasingly tools for "the rest of us" are filtering down. Easy languange isn't "easy" but its nothing like the real stuff.
Half a dozen programs let non-programmers code up some pretty good ideas. Yes its not as fast as it would be if a pro did it and yes if you your coding up some scap thing where milliseconds are the difference betwen sucess and failure, you probably can't do that with something off the shelf, but most of us aren't doing that. There are plenty of time frames to work on, and the further out you can go the easier it is.
Personally I think the most focus has gone into the millisecond black box scalp stuff and the EOD has been around forever so I like to focus on the stuff in the middle of that, plenty of tradeable time frames there. 1 min - hourly, etc.
And if you have an idea that works on the few stocks that you can monitor at once and would like to have a program do the same thing on 50-100-500, etc.....don't give away the idea without being 100% certain that its not gonna be lifted from you, because it happens all the time.
You give someone an idea, they code it up and it spits out a couple of grand a day, you think someone isn't gonna take your idea, tweak it out, rename it, and trade infront of you. You wonder why it worked great the first 6 weeks then didn't work as well. The guy coding it tells you volatility cooled off or its summer time, yeah maybe, maybe things changed, maybe some else figured out the same inefficieny you did, but maybe your idea has found its way into something else so similar you'd swear all they did was rename it and slap 2-3 additional rules onto it.
Don't be a fool. Proceed with extreme caution. Not saying don't do it, just do it right. (Not refering to any firm in particular so don't PM, am refering to all firms/programmers in general that promise to automate your idea for a split).