Hi. It's been a while. In fact I was actually trying to make this website look dead. I'll explain why...

TS is being held back by the brokers it currently connects with. Not the number (two), but by the brokers themselves. Gain Capital and Oanda.

I allow auto trading only in Gain Capital demo accounts, because there was no way I could test trading in live accounts without risking real money. Testing is normally what demo accounts are for, but talk in their forums made it out that there are differences between the demo and live accounts. Not good.

One of the chiefs at Gain Capital has told me this is untrue, and asked that I reconsider. And I might in the future.

Oanda has the obvious stumbling block of needing to pay $600 per month for their API. Which is fine if you already have the trading system and the volume. But not good for starting out. Or if you want to take a holiday or something.

So I was looking at Interactive Brokers (IB), EFX Group, and/or MB Trading. Their APIs are free, and apparently good. (BTW, if you didn't know, recently EFX Group and MB Trading became one and the same).

As a side note, in the not-too-distant future I'd like TS to work with shares as well.

As it happens, Medved Quotetracker allows connections to IB, MB, and a bunch of share-trading places. Yay. All I have to do is hook into Quotetracker and a lot of problems are solved at once.

And I was all ready to do that. But then...

I've been approached many times by people who want to go into partnerships. Generally people who want to market my software. Nothing ever got past a couple of emails back and forth.

Until... a bigwig at a forex brokerage stumbled across my site. This time things got serious. A lot of effort was put into the wording of a contract. I signed the contract. I was given a contract-signing fee. Instead of doing the Quotetracker stuff, I was spending all my free time putting in the features that this forex brokerage requested. (Did I say all of my free time? I meant ALL of my free time! :-). And then... it all fell apart.

The deal was that the company would pay me, and then provide the software for free to all of their customers. But exclusively, meaning I could no longer make it available for other forex companies (which at that time and still now is Gain Capital and Oanda). Existing customers could continue to use the old version, but were not going to be given upgrades. So they'd still be able to use what they'd paid for, but that would be that. At least that's how I remember the deal.

So... my integrity told me that I should not try to get new customers. Because it would not be good, in my way of thinking at least, to espouse a product, get people to sign up (which for some entails buying the $600 Oanda API), and then a month later say "oh yeah, you're on your own". BTW, back then I was under strict instruction not to make any of this public, so the option of just telling people what was going on was not available.

And that is why I have not posted for a long time, and tried to make this site look dead, and removed the 12 month plans from the purchase page. Yeah, it was a crazy situation to be in.

But you still came and signed up! Didn't you! DIDN'T YOU! :-) Every couple of weeks or so, someone would write a forum entry somewhere with a link here which would bring a bunch of new members and new sign-ups.

Anyway, now that TS is no longer under contract, please keep writing forum entries and signing up :-)


Where to from here?

Well, the coding for v2.0.0 is almost finished. Then comes testing. And then comes release. And v2.0.0 contains most of the things that the forex brokerage requested. There's a whole bucket load of stuff, but the major points are:

• Wizards. A lot of people had trouble getting set up initially, and it's hoped these Wizards will now make everything much easier.
• Backtesting results no longer print out to Excel files. In fact there is no reliance on Excel nor CSV files at all. The results are instead saved to the database, and you get a pretty equity curve chart.
• After backtesting, you can click a button and TS will fill in a chart with all the indicators that you used in the trading system, and show you where all the entries and exits were.
• You can have more than one chart window open.
• You can import/export trading systems and alerts. For backup and sharing. And if you want to sell your system but don't want others to know how it works, you can encrypt it if you want. Encrypted systems will still backtest/auto-trade on other peoples' machines, but they won't be able to see or change any of the rules. Not even if they peek in the database.
• Auto-trading is now kicked off by new prices coming in, not from a timer.
• Removed the Help sections from individual windows, and the separate PDF document, and now use a standard Windows help file.
• It looks a cooler than before :-)

Pretty much all I have left to code is repeat everything for the Indicator-based Alerts that I've already done for Trading Systems.

Then once v2.0.0 is out, v2.0.1 is going to be a bug-fix and documentation release (because with all the changes now the documentation is a lot different in some places to how the program works). And then I go back to Medved Quotetracker.

So yeah, I'm still around, TS is still being worked on (feverishly), and that's why stuff happened like it did.