From a poster on the RB board:
By: tommytwotone60601
14 Feb 2006, 11:35 AM EST
Msg. 262 of 264
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I met with Strickland last evening at Ceres, the local trader's watering hole in the lobby of the Board of Trade. I have known him for years as we both hung our hats at Petco/Peters back in the day. As I recall, he was a spreadsheet freak then.
Anyway, he had a wireless notebook with him and offered to show me his product. I expected to see an Excel trading template and, truthfully, I could not envision an Excel trading product that would have the market potential he believed it did. He changed my mind.
I was very impressed by the design. He said that they had two rules for the design. One was to keep it simple, the other was to remain true to Excel functionality. This product is no template. Instead, it extends the functionality of Excel. When you first open it up, it is just a blank spreadsheet...he called it a "canvass for trading art."
Now we get to the part where I was stunned. He built this table (in about 3 seconds) that defined trading buttons and then used a few formulas and the macro recorder to build a simple automated trading system. He showed me some tricks that made the buttons transmit limit orders on the current bid, adjust volume automatically according to short-term volatility, trade spreads, and construct an order tree that had multiple order types including simple formulas for OCO orders. All together, I think the order chain was 15 orders. It was completely automated, but he could manually intervene.
One of the coolest features of the product is the technical analysis tools. You can just insert technical indicators (it seemed like there were about 100 of them) into a spreadsheet column that returned their values. He created a simple moving average cross-over system with an "If" statement, and then automated it. We traded the e-mini for over an hour.
I asked him why he didn't just go to the market with this product now because it worked flawlessly. He said that the product would be launched in March, but not before some additional patents were filed and customer support was staffed. He also said that writing the user documentation was tough because the the product was integrated so nicely into Excel that, like Excel, there were so many ways to accomplish the same thing.
He also told me that when the product is launched it would connect to several brokers and execute trades on 34 different exchanges. I can tell you that this product is the most creative effort I have seen since the Schwartzatron (mid-1980s). It is truly an original idea.
Anyway, I am writing this to you because he asked me to tell a few traders who might be interested in the product. I told him that I was not only extremely interested in the product but in his stock. I have an appointment to go talk with him next Tuesday after the close.
Good Trading,
Tom
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