The Trading Software Market is Dead

The existing software is really good. The days where anything new would find a market are behind us. Lots of the new software I see is hardly better than Tradestation 2000 was thirteen years ago.
 
It's probably a growth issue. Clearly from a growth perspective, the social media/mobile app crap is more attractive. In the online trading world , growth is simply not very attractive. VC's want huge growth potential and also they are sheeps as many other investors, they follow trends.

In the software world it's very much a matter of having the right product at the right time IMHO of non techie, a promising sector becomes quickly populated with me-too players and prices collapse, see how much free stuff there is around for trading.
 
Linda Raschke bought Photon Trader long time, never cared to market it even though it is in constant development. I guess, she is capitalized well enough. And for my needs I did not see anything better on retail market. Split feeds for execution and display work brilliant. Different strokes..
 
Openquant brought event-driven structure to the writing of scripts for trading that cannot be beat. They also have tick by tick testing that implements the entire FIX protocol and Simulated Annealing for speeding up large optimizations. Ninjatrader brought documentation that includes code examples for every function they have. Sierrachart brought customer service that is unparalleled. They fix bugs in a matter of a day or two and the fixes never break anything else. AMIBroker brought speed. The entire app runs in the processor cache. It can process things far faster than imaginable. Tradestation brought a great grid app and wonderful convenience and esthetics. Copy a list of stock symbols from Excel and paste them into Radarscreen and you are up and running with a thousand new symbols in a matter of seconds. Click on a symbol and you have a great looking chart immediately.

If somebody brings a new product that does all of that it will be able to find a market.
 
Quote from Baron:

Not true. Products like new niche trading software (retail) have about zero chance of becoming a success unless they are marketed to the correct target audience. I literally get contacted every day by someone who's developed the next big thing but I see the same problem happen over and over again..... they have virtually NO MONEY to market their product. Even in cases where a person has spent the last 10 years of his life developing a new groundbreaking algorithmic trading product, all I hear is crickets chirping when I ask him what his marketing budget is. It's as if the last thing that he ever thought about was spending one dime to get his product in front of a qualified audience.




This brings up another major problem that I come across regularly, which is that a trader is either a programmer or he's not. Unfortunately, this creates a massive educational gap between the guys that develop good trading software and those non-programming traders that simply want to use, customize and/or extend that software. So what I'm seeing are new software products developed by math geniuses that take a PhD to understand and operate, with little to no documentation written in language that an average human can understand.

Another issue that I see is pricing. When I ask a potential software advertiser how much his product cost, it's either priced way too low for the size of it's potential market (like $39), or it's way out in the stratosphere like $3,500+ for a short term license and support. When I ask them what the basis for their pricing is, it's almost always based on a false premise.

So let's pretend for a moment that someone with a great software product at a reasonable price comes to me with enough money to market his product for the next six months. As soon as the word about his product gets out and people start checking it out, GOD FORBID that there is one bit of negative feedback. It's like the software creator's ego was manufactured out of that fake shatter glass they use in the movies, and it just got hit with a claw hammer. So I have to teach him how to have a thick skin and deal with constructive criticism without crawling in a hole with a box of tissues.

So in summary, what it all boils down to is this: Programmers of trading software are horrible at business on every level. Although they may have the skills required to create an outstanding or revolutionary product, they have virtually none of the business skills required to make that product a commercial success.
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why are they coming to you? and why do you have to teach them?:confused:


Anyways, give me a phone and simple chart and I could trade all day long. People seem to have lost sight of what trading is all about imho.
 
My friend who works in IT told me once that trading software business is in trouble because of open source source software, free software from brokers and exponential growth of piracy. David Aronson is giving away his tssb software for free and hopes to make money from users that require support. I am sure if he could sell it he would. On top of this I think the number of retail traders with money to spend on software is only a fraction of what was in late 1990s. Developing and marketing trading software is probably one of the worse business one can get involve with at this point.
 
jeeze, I think all a piece of software needs to do to sell well is help you make money that you can't make using anything else.

easy right?
 
As a retail option trader myself, I already have access to a trading platform (thinkorswim) that was built from the ground up specifically for that...and it's free! No need for me to pay for a platform. As mentioned in this thread, retail is catching on to what makes real money and what doesn't, so, in my opinion, it's getting harder to sell trading software that does not have validation that it will make money for someone at a greater rate (chance or more edge) than the free stuff.
 
Quote from Squilly_D:

As a retail option trader myself, I already have access to a trading platform (thinkorswim) that was built from the ground up specifically for that...and it's free! No need for me to pay for a platform. As mentioned in this thread, retail is catching on to what makes real money and what doesn't, so, in my opinion, it's getting harder to sell trading software that does not have validation that it will make money for someone at a greater rate (chance or more edge) than the free stuff.
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I get your point, but at some future date, you may no longer view the TOS software as free. By all accounts, it's quite adequate and maybe even quite good, but once you start trading more frequently and/or trading larger positions, you'll find that it might be costing you several hundred dollars a month or more in excess commissions.
 
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