Hi Friends,
I want to know what should be the good subcrption fee I should charge.
I have opened account since 2 months but not getting investor to invest in my strategy.
You see Topaz?
Its performance stats, its ranking?
It took Topaz three years to get subscribers…
Rene,
When you say "It took Topaz three years to get subscribers…", does this mean a "large" amount of subscribers or "any" subscribers?
What kept you hanging in there (mentally) at C2 after three years and minimal subscription fees?
In the first Topaz has 40 % DD so it did not get subscribers & spend second year system spend time in recovering the account & in the third it got good growth and confirmation that it will do well. Meanwhile system provider has lost 5 accounts.
So due to this system needed 3 years.
From your experience it seems very difficult to have investors.
Anyway my question was how much cost is suitable for the system to get subscriber in the beginning period of the system ?
I am OK to have USD 500 monthly in the begining period.
Well, in fact the first paying subscriber started in July 2007, just three months after inception. Many came, checked and went away again. There are some one-or-two months subscriptions along this early way.
But it was not before June 2010 that subscriber numbers started to build up and rose about the “1, 2 or 3 occasional subscribers” level.
Why I did it? - good question…
Back in 2007 I was confident to have some working ideas but nobody seemed to be interested. People (read potential customers) kept asking for some track record or similar evidence. (Broker statements, etc)
So I decided to build a “audited” track record at C2. It also was a nice challenge to get a fully automated trading system running on a day-by-day basis - reliably.
End of 2008 everything (profits, global stock market) broke down and I kept it running just because the fully automated process worked quite well and I was curious how things develop.
Today Topaz’ track record on C2 is one of my main instruments to find new customers for finantic - Persistence Is the Key…
Kiran,
my advice: stay below $100 monthly fees in the beginning. If your subscriber number approaches something like 50 or even 100 you may raise your monthly fees to something like $150.
Good advice. Let me reduce my fee from 200 to 50 to see what will happen. Now people like to come but they just go after trial period.
Hi Rene,
Thank you for the advice. Keep growing.
Regards,
Kiran
Investors are trying to get short cut money by going forex market.
But smart investors invest in strategy related to Stock as they no there money is safe here.
I expect Investors to become smart investors.
Right, it looks like forex/future systems get more subscribers. However many those systems have huge drawdown.
Rene is right. You have to make a credible case why someone will trust you with their money.
1. Personnal background, experience, education, perseverence, will you stop trading without telling your subs…
2. Strategy, describe its best markets, reaction period, historical backtest results, whats the edge, why hold it through a drawdown, is the startup period performing as expected …
3. Account size recomendations: Many strategies are not scaleabe to small size. A new strategy is risky, so subs want small size. Make it easy, state the issues.
You have to make the case. Just throwing your strategy out there doesn’t do it. Put yourself in the subscribers shoes. Address all concerns and the sale is a sure thing.
- You should also be trading your own strategy. Your name should appear on the autotrade traders list. That more than anything would lend confidence to new subscribers. Like a venture capitalist would demand that your skin be in the game if he is to put his money into the venture. This is especially important for new strategies with only a few months of running time. C2 should have a special rating for authors who do this and an automatic notification to all subscribers if the autotrade is stopped.
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Agree 1,000%
I wish C2 had a simple search function to list all systems where the vendor autotrades their own system. Vendors autotrading their own systems seems to be extremely rare, and it doesn’t speak very well to the quality of the trading systems available.
Whenever I’ve asked a vendor why they don’t autotrade their own system, all I get are excuses. The most common one being, “I trade the system myself, but not through C2”. Well, that’s just dandy, but unless you’re willing to publish your brokerage account records, there’s no way for anyone to verify that.
I believe the two things that would do the most to increase the quality of trading systems on C2 are:
1) System vendors are not allowed to collect subscriber fees until they’ve completed a one-year probationary period
2) System vendors must demonstrate, by AutoTrading their system, or through some other independently verifiable method, that they are putting their own money at risk
After that, the “best subscription cost” is, pretty much, whatever the market will bear. I, personally, think anything over $200/month is extremely expensive, and it would take a very unique set of circumstances for me to be willing to pay that much (and I trade in pretty large size).
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I would like to autotrade my system. How much does it cost to trade my own system? Do I need to pay monthly fee for the autotrading software (not the fee for my system because it is free to me)?
It depends on how you want to AutoTrade it.
As you mentioned, there’s no cost to subscribe to your own system and set up the basic autotrade function. I use Gen1 AutoTrading with TradeBullet as an interface. Although the TradeBullet license is $480/year, my broker gives me a commission break for using their FIX Interface (which is what TradeBullet connects to). The net result is that I, actually, save money by autotrading my own system, since I save more in reduced commissions than I spend on the TradeBullet license.
The only difficult thing about using TradeBullet is you need to keep it running continuously on your own computer. But I’ve been using it for over six months and found the setup to be very reliable.
If you want to spend a little more money, you can go the Gen3 AutoTrade route. The advantage is that you don’t have to run your own, intermediate, software interface. The disadvantage (beside the cost), is that there aren’t very many Gen3 AutoTrade brokers to choose from.
You can check out all the details of AutoTrading by selecting the AutoTrade item off the top menu bar on the C2 Dashboard.
My system just sells for $20/month. It is hard to justify to pay at least 500/year to play autotrade unless I can collect enough subscription fee for me to pay it. Fortunately I have subscribers who are autotrading my system. Maybe they can speak out for me later. If my system gets poupular, sure I will autotrade it. By the way, my broker is interactivebrokers. I don’t know if it works with autotrade well.
Well, I do Trade Topaz myself. In several accounts. These are IB accounts directly driven by my computer.
Then I use auto-trading through global-autotrading.com. Unfortunately all this is not visible on C2.
BTW, the founder of global-autotrading said he wanted to let me trade Topaz there for free (in my private account) and asked if he can use the signals for his own private account… 
So people who trade the Forex market are not smart investors, and money is safe in the stock market???
Are you sure on this one?
Paper trading is much easier then trading with real money. Why, because the trader can relax and just trade because there is no real money at stake. Now when the same trader puts his/ her money on the line everything will change for all but the few lucky ones with the not so bad states of mind.
Who would you rather have trading your money?
1) The trader who does not have his/her money at stake and therefore is relaxed and can trade as though they are paper-trading. Or
2) The trader who is trading his own personal account and sweating bullets.
My point is things are not always as simple as they seem and there can be unintended consequences to all rules/laws. This is why freedom of choice is so precious.
I personally would take the relaxed comfortable trader over what some think they want and if that is a seasoned trader who also auto-trades that would even be better but there aren’t many of those around.
Another thought, here is a 22 year old whiz who comes up with a great system and has subscribers and everyone is happy. Now some people here at C2 want all traders to show they auto-trade their systems at C2 and so this young fellow uses some of his subscriber money to start live trading here at C2 and as he/she experiences their first draw-down he/she begins sweating bullets and wipes out the account. Now who wins, no one. All was fine and now it’s over. Even automated systems can be tinkered with by those who begin sweating bullets as the fear and greed have swept in.
The bottom line here is if a system is good it is good and it is up to each one of us to find the good ones.
Sometimes I wonder if it might be that a subscriber thinks they will just feel better knowing the vender lost their money also. If so that is dark!
Timea,
I think the best combination is this one:
Have a computer generate all trading signals. The “vendor” just cares about working hardware, software and internet connections and invests his own money in this very same fully automated system.
Topaz works this way, all signals generated by some pages of code, delivered since April 2007 unaltered.
There are some days I do “sweat bullets” however. It happens when my data provider didn’t update all stock data, when my server hosting company does some “maintenance”, when my internet provider goes asleep or if C2’s servers do not repond - enough reasons to feel some stress.
But when the markets go up or down and Topaz’ equity curve does something related - its relatively easy to stay cool - I can’t do anything about it anyway. Just spend my time to answer customer’s inquiries…
