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At 12:36 AM 5/7/2004, Alex Matulich wrote:
>>I think TradeStation 7 has higher precision math.
>
>Good to know. Unfortunately it's software I have to rent. I'd rather
>own something outright.
For about the same price as I was paying for real-time data, I get that plus data-on-demand, plus TradeStation. Now if they would only adjust their mutual fund prices for distributions, I could get rid of Dial Data also... The current mutual fund prices are useless.
I LIKE their present business model. I was skeptical in the beginning because I was very much aware of the requirements of that business model and didn't think they could come close to making it work.
The old model was "use slick ads telling them how easy it is to make piles of money trading in your spare time, sell them the buggy software for a high one-time price, extend the payments over a year so that anybody can afford it, and hope they put it in the drawer, never use it, and never call for support."
But now, since they have to keep customers happy and paying the monthly fees, they have to make sure stuff works. Believe me, that has changed the quality of the product and the responsiveness of the company tremendously... I also use their brokerage service and have never had any problems. Amazing what the need to keep customers happy can do for a company...
Regarding your other points on the features you would like, you need to remember that the architecture of the product was created over a decade ago and computer programming languages have changed a great deal over that time. It incorporates some clever features, and some design decisions that I think are pretty strange. But generally you can workaround most of the shortcomings.
They tried to make it simple to use by non-programmers so that requirement, by definition, eliminates the flexibility and complexity of a full-blown programming language. I suspect that only a small fraction of their customers would use or appreciate the added complexity and probably would be scared off by it. You can do a lot of useful things in a few lines of code, which is more than you can say about the more complex applications...
And it is hard to change things too drastically. When you sell a programmable application, you have to make sure that all future versions are backward compatible so as to not break all the customer's code. That greatly restricts design flexibility.
It would be very nice to be able to extend the language in some reasonable way so that people who need special features could write their own commands. Maybe that would make everybody happier. Call-by-reference now makes it easy to create complex functions, which is what I use for special features I need - not the best solution but it works.
Bob Fulks
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