Are those credit card details validated though? I think not. In fact when I joined c2 I had problems getting an openecry demo account working, and ended up having to create a second account, to use as a demo. I put an expired CC in as payment details, and was still able to demo a system … I later subscribed to the system in my real account, so I don’t feel bad about it.
Maybe there should be a $1 joining fee for any free trial, just to check the CC. Or a small c2 “validated user” joining fee.
I Agree with Wladimir about the fees and so on. So what if a system is expensive, if it makes money, and vice versa.
The issue here is trust. For example, there is a system (can’t remember the name) that is charging $1500 subscription, with no free trial. The results look OK, but as far as i can tell, has no real subscribers. Yes, in theory maybe it’s a good system, and $1500 is small beer to the profits. But am I willing to take the risk? Nope. And no-one else seems to want to either. If I could experience it for real, watching trades in a demo account, or maybe scaling down, and playing with real money for a few days, I might be convinced.
Conversely, Aspire Trader’s Trending Futures system has a big 25 day free trial. I subscribed to this, despite not really having the capital to trade it, my money was tied up with other systems. After the 25 days, I decided to subscribe anyway, JUST FOR FOR COMMENTARY, and being “part of the action”, since I still didn’t have the capital to trade it.
Now I do, and am trading it, and, unless something goes badly wrong, am a loyal subscriber.
Yes, these systems are ultimately all about the results, which are plain to see from the archive records, but, there’s more to it than that, for me anyway.
No one said we cannot have free trials. The problem is the abuse it opens up to. The conversation is about how to amend the problems.
If someone expects others to plop down $1500, that is his problem. I wouldn’t free trial it anyway, unless it was the Holy grail. Systems have a habit of imploding eventually, so I doubt the $1500 one is any better than the $99 systems.
The something else, is of course that c2 only shows PAST results. I need convincing that the future will be the same. Particularly when you look at so many systems (even long-running, highly-regarded ones), and see that they perform extremely well for a time, and then, BOOM.
In fact I’ve experienced exactly this with 2 systems now, joining at the exact moment of detonation. Sure, they may come back in the long run, etc, but in the meantime, I’m standing aside.
So I like to get a full character of a system.
Agreed, about avoiding abuse, as I suggest, make free trials actually cost $1 up-front, so that the CC is validated, and only let people free-trial once.
Maybe if C2/Matthew could implement a "number of days signed up" that could work. Say Subscriber A signs up for 4 days to system 1 then drops. That 4 days stays with him in a log. Then if he signs back up, he starts at day 5. I doubt that would be very hard to program. Matthew any opinions on this?
Craig
Jack,
FYI, the system you were thinking about is called QT Quick Fire (I’m pretty sure) and if you look them up, you will see that I pasted a private message I sent them in my comments about it. They run a scam, and Beau Wolinsksy was detailed in how he thinks they operate:
"it’ll buy at the bid with futures, and sell at the ask. Neither of these is a possible trade in real life. You’ll have 1 tick of slippage on each side to trade it, and that 2 ticks on each trade brings the return down to -30%. Beau"
Stay away… I’m glad no one yet feel for their nice curve!
Yeah, I feel like a vendor should know when they’re being unrealistic. Good thing that c2 stat about keep after worst case slippage is there to tell the truth.
any scalping system rarely is worth joining
I have been here a couple of years, and cannot remember any system that stays in for 5-15 minutes, or tries to go for a couple of ticks per trade, and has made a real profit (with good system stats) for any length of time.
The trade costs are too much to overcome.
I believe you can validate CCs without charging them. Otherwise, yeah, maybe a one-time $1 validation fee, kinda like PayPal does. It could even be refunded upon joining the first system.
"any scalping system rarely is worth joining"
You say rarely, so what would it take to make a scalping system work for subscribers in your estimation.
what would it take to make a scalping system work for subscribers in your estimation
Don’t scalp and work on a longer time scale.
Any scalping system that looks good, probably has lousy ADP and/or realism+commission and/or Keep aftter slippage statistics.
It is hard (nearly impossible) to overcome a commission, slippage, bid/ask overhead when holding for a few minutes
Some clarification: here at C2 all credit card entries are pre-authorized (that is, validated) when they are typed in by the subscriber - even those used for free-trial systems. Verification includes billing-address matching. So system vendors can rest assured that their customers are legitimate.
On a higher level, let me step in and provide a different perspective. System vendors on C2 who gnash their teeth about how people “take advantage” of free trial periods miss the point. Most real traders are happy to pay you for your system. No, let me re-state that. They are delighted to pay you. Take it from someone who has been in this business for quite some time, on both the subscriber and vendor side of the equation. There’s a dearth of good systems out there. If you, a system vendor, can make money for customers more often than not, without taking large risks, and without asking the customer to stomach gut-wrenching drawdowns, then traders will worship the ground you walk on. They will gladly pay you $100, $200… $500 per month for good signals… if the signals make them more money than their subscriptions cost. I’m not sure where the idea developed that there’s a class of people out there, looking to rip off system vendors through elaborate cheating mechanisms. That’s silly. People that want good signals must have a reasonable trading account in which to use them. So the people who most need trading systems are not two-bit con-men or kids in their parents’ basements. People that want and use signals by definition have money. And people with money don’t bother to outsmart web sites for the sake of a hundred bucks per month.
Now let me make an observation about free trial periods for trading systems. Customers who “unsubscribe” during a free trial period would, in all likelihood, have never subscribed to your system without a free trial. The point of the free trial is to convert some (small) percentage of those customers who are unsure about your system, but who never would have paid you anything without some kind of trial period. Those customers that would have paid even without a trial will obviously stay with you when their trials end.
I am not poo-pooing all of the comments here. Some of the suggestions mentioned above (for example, rating people based on how many free trials they “use up” without paying, etc.,) are interesting, and probably worth exploring. But let’s do a reality check. Remember what kind of business we run. System vendors: you are in the intellectual property business. Your marginal cost of servicing one more subscriber is exactly zero. Because your marginal cost is zero, you want to make it easier, not harder, for subscribers to sign up to your system.
Compare this type of business to that of, say, Blue Nile, the Internet diamond retailer. On Blue Nile, people go to Web site, type in a credit card number, and ask to have a diamond sent to them through the mail. Want to talk about fraud risk? Blue Nile has some serious risk issues. They need to verify and re-verify every customer who signs up, before they send the customer a diamond in the mail. Why? Because they’re sending freaking diamonds, for crying out loud. The marginal cost of a diamond is high. If Blue Nile sends a diamond to a criminal who uses a stolen credit card, Blue Nile loses money. That’s why they make you jump through hoops on their web site, in order to verify each customer’s identity. In fact, they make it so hard to buy a diamond, that surely they drive away quite a few legitimate customers!
So, as we mull over what sort of security, verification, and hoop-jumping requirements we want on our Web site, let’s remember that. Yes, it’s obviously disappointing to an entrepreneur when a customer using his product during a free-trial period elects not to become a paying customer. But we need to keep in mind that those customers wouldn’t exist without trial periods.
I’m neither pushing nor denigrating the concept of free trials. In many cases, free trials are worth running. In many cases they are not. I would argue that the higher the price of your system, the more reason there is to offer a free trial. But whatever you decide, it’s important to keep things in perspective and not lose sight of the big picture.
Matthew
Can you address the problem of people who free trial, and leave negative or naive feedback, that were raised above?
— Is someone who pays nothing to use the system really a subscriber?
— Is there no way to prevent them from leaving reviews until they are a paying customer? They still have the option of putting comments into My Analyst.
— Can a vendor CHOOSE to allow/block free-trial reviews?
From some of the reviews I have seen, that alone would kill off much of my interest in free trials
"here at C2 all credit card entries are pre-authorized (that is, validated) when they are typed in by the subscriber - even those used for free-trial systems. Verification includes billing-address matching. So system vendors can rest assured that their customers are legitimate. "
So, you also compare customers across user IDs to prevent aliases?
If someone signed up with the same credit card under 5 different aliases and did free trials, C2 would block 4 of them?
If someone signed up using 4 different credit cards in their same name (Discover, VISA, AMEX, MC), C2 would block 3 of them?
Obviously there’s a trade-off. My feeling is that if you do not allow free-trialers to review a system, you skew the reviews towards being too positive. People who don’t like a system, and leave it before their trial ends, would not be allowed to review the system.
The way it works now is that you must be a subscriber for at least five days before you are allowed to review. Whether you pay or not is not a factor.
I can understand why system vendors want to change this policy, but I’d like to hear from the subscribers/traders. How would you feel if we changed the policy and did not allow you to post reviews of systems from which you unsubscribe from before paying?
Are you sure about the CC validation Matthew? For example, I think I created a “dummy” account in order to get an OEC demo trial working, and I used a dummy card for that - the CC number was valid, but I think the card had either expired, or was otherwise inactive. The “validation” you get with that algorithm that detects valid vs invalid card numbers is no use at all, especially against real criminals. You really have to make an actual charge to properly validate as far as I am aware.
Otherwise, I think you are absolutely right. A really successful vendor should have no problem with people paying, we absolutely want to pay for successful signals.
The “jumping through hoops” argument is entirely valid. In fact, it particularly applies to joining c2, as opposed to just trialing a system. In order to get setup on c2, in fact in order just to see a lot of essential information (eg how autotrading works, what the screens look like etc) you need to sign up. Then, to try out autotrading you need to subscribe to a system. Which requires your credit card number. I really think you need a “test system” that is easily available for people to try out, before having to enter their CC details, etc, etc. The way I got around this was to setup a trading system, that I then autotraded myself, so I could see how trades worked at my broker. I’m somewhat technical, this whole process must be a scary nightmare to someone who isn’t, and is risk-averse. However, once you’ve gone through the hoops to get yourself setup on c2, having to pay $1 (maybe refundable) to trial a system, or validate yourself as a bona-fide c2 user, etc, is no biggie. Sorry, slightly OT.
Also I meant to say, about reviews, is there a reason they are anonymous?
I think it would be fairer to vendors if they weren’t, and it would also prevent casual abuse, and add discipline to genuine reviewers, since you then “own” the review. ie If I want to say something bad about a system, I should be able to justify it, with my reputation at stake. Otherwise, after a bad trade, I could just throw up a damning review, safe in the knowledge no-one knows who wrote t.
I suppose I’d also like to hear from trader/subscribers about how they would react if reviews did not allow anonymity. What if we allowed the option of reviewers revealing their identity if they wanted to, but we did not require it?
