|
PureBytes Links
Trading Reference Links
|
Friend of mine is a CEO at a company that created a product that competes
with TS.
He told me a year ago that it cost over $20mm and continuing, over 3+ years.
My guess is, he needed another $10mm to get to the point of being
competitive with a RealTick.
Besides expensive labor of all IT technical types, there are costs for
networking, data feeds, servers, PCs, development tools, supplies, office
space, etc., etc.
And his product(s) contained fewer than half of the 1800+ function points
that exist in these products.
Consider this: there are over 80 such products targeted for the 10,000 to
20,000 genuine active/pattern traders primarily; and to the 120,000
occasional real time traders that seem to persist (with much membership
turnover in latter).
Do the math. Even if you use offshore labor and facilities, it still won't
work out to be a likely high profit venture in this overcrowded software
market.
Further, these trader numbers will decline as we continue through this long
term secular bear market - which may well have another ten years+ to run.
(See various interpretations of Kondratiev, Juglar, etal. - we seem to be in
a long Kondratiev Winter of low innovation, low markets, disinflation, etc.;
hear presentations of opinions by guru's as highly qualified as Richard Arms
Jr.; read the excellent past and current free emailings of John Mauldin at
www.2000wave.com.)
If you start out with a niche tool, then build more around it over a long
time period, you may do better. There are plenty of missing functions to
consider. But the more functions in a given tool, the higher the development
costs. Those costs likely rise geometrically or even exponentially, as
complexity increases.
Some friends and I are developing a number of niche trading software tools,
in our spare time...going very slowly, and we wish we had more help with our
website, studies research and the like...so the above should not discourage
you from taking a niche approach.
But creating a new RealTick or NeoTicker or Investor/RT or gr8trader or even
TS? You'll need very deep pockets, incredible patience and a lot of
uniquely talented folks...plus lawyers, accountants and other overhead
expertise to keep you out of financial and legal (copyright) troubles.
Vince Heiker
Flower Mound, TX
---
|