|
PureBytes Links
Trading Reference Links
|
Michael, I am shocked that you would attack me in a public forum like this,
given our history, without even an attempt to talk to me one on one first.
Possibly if you had run this by me I could have previewed to you what my
response would be, and we could have avoided what I am going to say below.
Instead, I am now forced to respond in a public forum.
It is important to point out that that you have never been a customer. You
have never paid me any money for any software.
Rather, you are someone who has approached me repeatedly since I have been in
the trading software business, every time I have done any kind of public
mention about trading software. There have been six (6) SIX times you have
approached me. You were one of the first people I talked to when I took out
my first magazine ad in 1990.
Each time were requests for demos, and discussions about how you were willing
to spend big money for the right software.
I remember one of those encounters. You had a "real time system" and were
looking for historical testing. I spent considerable time composing a written
design proposal describing how I would go about it. In the end, you
essentially said that my ideas were good, but the problem is that you already
employ a full time programmer, and you showed my ideas to your programmer,
and he said he could extend your current software (per my proposal) in 1
month. This was the first time I heard in these discussion that you were
already employing a full time programmer. You said (and I will never forget
this), "Surely you can understand, I already employ him and have to pay him
anyway, and if I hired you it would have to pay you also". I spent a lot of
time, and it seems like I never had much of a chance. Meanwhile, the next
time we talked you said this project with your programmer did not come
together in 1 month, but rather went on for months, then fell apart
uncompleted.
Another time you approached me looking for a charting module for a program
you had ported to DOS. We had the same problem we always have, which is that
you want intraday and my software has always been EOD. I came up with a
proposal where we could translate the intraday bars into dates, and then you
could use my existing EOD DOS charting software I had working at that time.
You responded that the idea of translating bars into dates was good, however
you could do that yourself and input the results into System Writer, which
you already owned. Again, I walked away with $0.
Several years later was the encounter you refer to in this current
discussion. In catching up with what had been happening since we last talked,
you told me that eventually you hired someone and spent considerable money
writing a real intraday charting program (not the date translation scheme). I
would have loved to have bid on that project for the amount of money you had
spent, but you never came back to me and gave me the opportunity. I proposed
the date translation scheme as a low cost quick and dirty solution. If I had
realized the amount of money you had been willing to spend, I would have
loved to bid on a project of giving you real intraday charts. But you never
came back to me.
With this new encounter you were looking for intraday portfolio testing.
Again we had our usual problem that PowerST is EOD and you wanted intraday.
You mentioned to me that you were going to offer $20,000 to the programmer
who wrote the charting program for you. In the dynamics of a phone call (in
other words, with zero time to think about it), I said that for $20K I would
consider taking on the project of expanding PowerST to intraday. However, you
pretty much said that you were going to work with the other programmer, and
the only barrier was some legal question he was dealing with. It seemed my
chances of success were limited, and I requested that we wait to see how it
plays out with the other programmer because I didn't want to spend time
bidding on a project when it appeared to me you had already made your
decision to go with the other programmer if that worked out. After all, you
had a previous working relationship with him, where you had no previous
relationship with me, other than these six encounters where you never hired
me for anything.
Meanwhile, some time later, you said it was still up in the air with the
other programmer, and again you asked me for a demo. At that time, I decided
to declined bidding on the project of adding intraday support to PowerST for
the $20K. It seemed to me that my chances of landing the project were slim,
and I didn't want to spend a week of my time on discussions and design memos
to again be turned down.
Meanwhile, I continued working with the customer I was already working with
at the time you and I were talking in April-May 2000. He is now fully
transitioned to PowerST, from his previous platform of TradeStation with an
Excel add-on he was writing himself. In December 2000 he wrote a commentary
on his experience, which is included in the full new web site (it is quite
positive). He was a paying customer and PowerST is satisfying his trading
software needs. We are continuing to work together. That is what I really
care about. That PowerST fulfills the needs of paying customers. I don't care
much about the opinion of what someone who never purchased anything from me.
> I felt compelled to reply to Bob Bolotin's Power ST
> infomercial. (Bob, please don't take this as a personal
> attack, but I've received valuable info on the list, and
> sometimes am able to proffer info in return.)
How could I take this as anything but a personal attack?
> I had rather extensive negotiations with Bob in April-May,
> 2000. Much of what he is promising now, he was promising
> about 1 1/2 years ago. For instance, for $ 20,000 (my
> suggestion) he thought he could change his priorities to add
> intra-day support.
Yes, and I ended up declining to bid on the project. As a result I have spent
no time on intraday. I made the decision to concentrate on an EOD only
release first. I **DID NOT** promise intraday April-May 2000. Rather, we
discussed the possibility that I would add this at your request for a $20K
bribe.
It is only in the last few weeks that intraday has come up again because
another programmer has approached me and volunteered to add intraday support,
largely independently of my continuing to work on the EOD release, so that he
could use the end result himself. This is why I said in my previous post,
"Intraday support is starting to be worked on, but the initial release will
most likely still be EOD only". In the personal emails I have exchanged with
people with a prospective current interest in PowerST, I have been very clear
that PowerST is EOD only at this time. Also, this is the full quote from my
previous post:
<<<<
PowerST is current end of day data only. Intraday support is starting to
be worked on, but the initial release will most likely still be EOD only.
>>>>
I think it is quite clear than I am warning that PowerST is an EOD program,
and will likely still be through the (future) initial release. That was the
point of the paragraph. I am warning that PowerST is an EOD only program. I
would not accept money from someone based upon a promise of intraday within a
specified time frame. Intraday will come, but it isn't my top priority at
this time. If someone offered me $20K for intraday support I might change my
mind and make it a top priority. But at this point even for $20K I am much
closer to a release which I expect to yield much more than $20K in income
than I was when we last talked, so I think I would be better off continuing
with my plan towards an EOD release first. However, there is quite a bit of
hope that intraday is going to happen without my direct effort from this new
partnership with the other programmer. Or even if that does not work out (he
is doing this as volunteer work, not paid help, so my control is limited),
once the EOD release is finished eventually intraday will then become my own
top priority and it will happen.
> He wanted a nondisclosure agreement to see a demo. Even
> though he has a web site, and "promotes" the product, I had
> to agree not to even mention the name of the product to
> potential competitors.
Yes, you blasted me about this before. I don't quite understand. I have not
been pressuring anyone into nondisclosure agreement. Rather, I have been
saying... well, here is exactly what I have been saying to recent private
responses:
<<<<
If you don't want to answer the above questions, that's ok. There will be
public announcements and a detailed public web site forthcoming, and you will
then be able to read all about PowerST without any need for these questions
>>>>
One of the questions I refer to in the above quote is the nondisclosure
issue. I don't understand what the problem is. What need did you have to
discuss the product with potential competitors? Requests for nondisclosure
are very common in the software industry. You are the only one who as
objected to my constant nondisclosure requests to everyone I have shown a
demo or the full web site to.
> In short, Bob may be a very capable programmer, although the
> 12+ years he has been developing PowerST, and still "in the
> current prerelease period" seems a bit excessive even to an
> obsessive as myself.
It is only the latest version which is prerelease. I have been shipping
product for the entire 12+ year history. I think you know I used to be in the
business of supplying software for commercial trading systems. In that period
I shipped many hundreds of copies of software to real customers. Also, I have
been doing custom programming all along, which is how you and I ended up
talking. Fortunately, there have been others where the types of discussions
you and I have had did lead to paying jobs.
> I'll let Bob speak:
> "There are competitors out there (and I think every one of
> them has approached me at one time or another trying to get
> information about PowerST). "
>
> " My post was not a product announcement, but rather I was
> casually saying that there is another alternative emerging.
>
> Alternative to TS? Yet,
> " PowerST is current end of day data only.
> " PowerST is strictly a testing platform. ... There is no
> real time charting (and probably never will be )"
>
> " Fact is I would take on 1 or 2 more customers at this time
> if I could find
> people willing to start with the current feature set."
>
> "Also, to be direct about it, 'prerelease' means there are
> still some features missing. In particular, charting is not
> working yet."
>
> Yes, after 12+ years, the replacement for TS does not have
> charting.
I never said PowerST is a replacement for all of TS. The following is a
longer quote from my previous post, part of which you quote above:
<<<<
Something which seems to cause confusion: As the name "The Power System
Tester" implies, PowerST is strictly a testing platform. The specialty is
trading system research.
>>>>
Your logic above makes no sense. You criticize me for claiming PowerST is a
replacement for TS, and in the text of that criticism you quote text from my
post which clearly says that PowerST is "strictly a testing platform" and
will probably never have real time charting. PowerST is what it is, and I
think I have always tried to be extremely clear about what it is. Even the
name, "PowerST: The Power System Tester" implies it. It is a "system tester".
A testing platform. It is only a replacement for the testing aspects of TS,
not a replacement for the real time charting portion of TS. I could go into a
long discussion about the tradeoffs of that (the full web site does go into
that discussion in depth), but instead I will defer the discussion until the
full web site is publicly posted.
The fact is that there are people interested in an advanced testing platform.
There are people who have viewed the PowerST features in depth (more depth
than you have seen) and are paying money for the software with full knowledge
of what it offers. PowerST is light years beyond any other software on the
market in testing capabilities.
An EOD trader doesn't need real time charting. There are quite a few EOD
traders out there who have been using TradeStation only for the historical
testing features. For those EOD traders, PowerST is a superior platform in
every way. For an intraday trader, it remains to be seen. I don't have any
experience accumulated because PowerST doesn't yet support intraday. However,
I suspect that when people see what PowerST offers in testing capabilities
there will be intraday traders interested in using PowerST for testing even
if they have to go to another package for real time.
For example, here is a quote from a post cash@xxxxxxxxxxx made to this omega
list 6/28/2001 which I found very encouraging:
<<<<
Let me preface this by saying I don't care about real-time intraday data.
Once I have a strategy, I put it into FirstAlert and execute it manually
based on
that software's signals. FirstAlert is excellent at scanning the market for
my
conditions and far exceeds Tradestation in this ability, so intraday
real-time
data for Tradestation is not of a concern, only intraday historical.
>>>>
Cash and I have emailed, but unfortunately I don't have intraday support to
offer him at this time. However, I do believe that there will be others like
him that will want an intraday testing platform even if it does not also
support real time.
> IMO, the $5,000 price --and 1 1/2 years ago Bob was asking
> for the full price, even though it was "unfinished
> software"-- should only be considered if you realize it may
> take many more years before PowerST is useable for extensive
> intra-day testing & analysis.
Actually, in response to a criticism about price that Gary Fritz posted
several months ago, the decision was made to break PowerST into packages
starting at $2400. However, it is correct that the full package is still the
same $5,000.
As to your tone in the above quoted paragraph, I have always tried to be very
clear about the status of the software. There have been people willing to pay
the price despite the status because PowerST has features not available
elsewhere. Also, the early users have been given a high level of support, I
have many times added features at the request of early users, and early users
will get free upgrades to the released package. Also, I have never asked for
full payment up front. Rather, it has been agreements for deposits followed
by successive payments as the customer gains confidence that the software is
meeting their expectations. I have always delivered what I contracted to
delivery. I can say for a fact that nobody has yet asked for their deposit
back. It is not a situation where someone has paid full price and is still
waiting for usable software. Rather, those who have paid have received what
they contracted to receive. Most of those in the past were customer
programming customers. More recently the full package as a testing
environment where end users can program their own systems. Yes, there are
still features missing, but on the other hand, PowerST is usable as is. I
don't hear current customers complaining because they know they have software
with capabilities not available elsewhere. Yes, currently they need to live
without charting, but that was a decision they made.
As far as your statement about "extensive intra-day testing & analysis",
indeed PowerST is currently a program only for EOD. I am not encouraging
anyone to purchase PowerST at this time for intraday support. However, if
someone asks, there is the expectation that intraday will be added in the
future. However, if you need intraday now, I can't offer that now.
Actually, intraday doesn't look that hard. It is more than I made the
decision to go for a fully complete EOD package first as a controlled growth
strategy. EOD only will limit the initial marketplace to EOD traders, but
then the need is to add new customers slowly anyway. It was a decision, and I
still think it is the correct decision. I considered varying from that
decision when you and I discussed the $20K bribe, but all things considered I
think I made the correct decision to not bid on that project.
Ok, you had your say. I gave my response. I think it is unfortunate that you
decided to initiate this discussion in a public forum when obviously we have
a history and you are not an objective observer. If you want to discuss this
further, I suggest we do it offline. Or even better, I think it is better
that we both go about our separate lives and ignore each other. I enjoy
working with customers, not getting into flame wars with someone who has
never been a paying customer.
I never thought you were a bad person. Well, at least until this post you
just made. It just never worked out between us, largely because he always had
the same problem that my software was EOD and you wanted intraday.
Bob Bolotin
President, RDB Computing, Inc.
Developer of "PowerST: The Power System Tester"
http://www.powertesting.com
powerst@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
847-982-1910
|