I got a 1.5 hr one already. And he and I regretted my inability to come early last week when I called him and had a brainstorm. Let me recount a story for you.
I subscribe to a service that is called TraderBot. What I use it for is to serve me alerts of a very special kind. I trade off of them. Since I am very informed about all the screeners and automated alert systems, I wanted to let Paul know that TraderBot had decided to go entirely institutional, meaning that those of us that are not institutions would not be able to subscribe. Bad news, but then a cool thought popped up. I had gone to the ACT IV web site when it was PRed and I recalled something: if you look at the ACT IV datafeed page and look at the companies they feed data for, there is VHAYU Inc. Who are they, you ask? Well, they operate TraderBot. So here I am, dreading losing the hands down best alert robot out there and I notice that both companies are serviced by ACT IV datafeed. So I called Paul and explained, somewhat overenthusiasically, that they might be able to buy TraderBat and, with a minimum of programming (since it presumable employed the ACT IV API), land a pre-built, mature screener/alert robot that could become a huge boon to retail stock traders such as TD Ameritrade has. Well the long and short of it was that Paul already knew folks at Vhayu (he seems to pretty much know everybody) and I got put on speakerphone, Paul called the Spooz crew into his office, they made the call to Vyahu and discovered that the code had been written by someone apparently no longer with Vyahu and that the problem was that it needed support/mainainance/upgrade work and so there was no practical way to make it fit like I had hoped. Paul & I talked and he told me a bit about how he traded and I told him how I do (like a tricycle by comparison LOL) and he told me he would be putting a sophisticated screener into the release of SpoozTools for retail stock trading, which he admited was phase 2 (phase 1 being futures / commods / options/ etc). He also told me that it would take some work but I could build what I do today using a variety of services using SpoozTools alone, which was encouraging.
Anyway the point of my telling this is that it illusrtrates one extremely important and highly unique aspect of Mr. Strickland SIR!!: he is accessible. Really really accessible. Another thing is that he is used to crayonning outside the lines and he easily sees opportunities and he is willing to run with a hairbrained idea that sounds good. He was genuinely disappointed that there was no easy fit here because he too saw that it just might have turned out that the shutting down of TraderBot was a bird nest on the ground for Spooz.
I wish I could have attended, though.
GLTY
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