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Today they are allowed to become Elite Members.
I am asking for a discussion on whether or not that should change.
All Elite Members are already instructed to not share any Elite content outside of the Elite section. But we all know that some vendors take the code developed here, and then resell their own version of it. We also all know that some vendors are better than others, and would never do that.
I am trying to stay neutral and solicit feedback from others. So I won't comment further and instead would like to hear from everyone else.
I vote yes ... if a vendor breaks the rules... boot the offending vendor to the curb
If Vendors are no longer allowed to be Elite members ... Hello , Houston ... we have a problem .... Nobody and I mean Nobody is willing to give up @Fat Tails
I'm just a simple man trading a simple plan.
My daddy always said, "Every day above ground is a good day!"
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on the potential for losers to take stuff that is not theirs and repackage it for sale to the unsuspecting...true that. Also though something could be done to protect the mostly clueless from the mostly unscrupulous...who happen to be mostly clueless as well.
Everyone understands that the overwhelming majority of futures.io (formerly BMT) members are here seeking something. That kind of makes us all targets. A group of 35,000+ interested or engaged in trading financial markets.
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Site Administrator Swing Trader Data Scientist & DevOps
Manta, Ecuador
Experience: Advanced
Platform: My own custom solution
Trading: Emini Futures
Posts: 49,753 since Jun 2009
Thanks: 32,299 given,
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I'll clarify one thing further as well: I am referring to vendors that sell indicators or trading rooms. I categorize Platforms and Brokerages separately, even though they share the 'Vendor/Commercial Product' designation (something I may change).
Harry @Fat Tails I do not know what his product or service is, but I can say almost unconditionally that I'd endorse it. This, I'm sure, is not a Fat Tails rule.
On a personal level, my own insecurity prevents me from publishing or even posting a screenshot that contains things that I view as even remotely proprietary in nature. I wish I could get over that. Not because I "seek" a "following", but because I've made so many errors and paid so much in "tuition" over the years that it is a shame others can't learn from my mistakes.
As long as the same rules apply about self promotion and they didn't copy elite downloads and try to profit from them, I would be OK with it. It just kills me when I see an indicator on a vendor's website that only takes 10 minutes to code and they are charging $100. I might lose it if a saw a blatant duplicate of someone's hard work on this forum being sold somewhere else.
There is NO chance to prevent futures.io (formerly BMT) readers to copy parts of the bits offered here - be it on normal or on Elite section.
If a vendor decides to get some code - nothing simpler than that:
just logging in with another member name - DONE...
GFIs1
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If they are going to use the social network for their own personal commercial gain then perhaps it is only fair they give something back in return, in the form of some quality indicators so people can see the quality of their product before sending them money. Fat Tails is a prime example of how that relationship can work well for everybody.
I think it would not prevent theft to not let them become elite members. It is jut too easy to circumvent.
Furthermore, I have seen some vendors contributing substantially and profoundly to elite threads, it would be a shame to limit this in the future. After all, some vendors became vendors because they have great knowledge in some field. Contributing in their respective field of expertise (without giving away their secret sauce or promoting their product) can be a huge benefit to the futures.io (formerly BMT) community. Just read some threads about market data reporting/structure or tape reading and you should get my point....
Vvhg
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Hic Rhodos, hic salta.
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This will not stop the unscrupulous from stealing elite code here and selling it elsewhere. They don't have to register as a vendor to have access to elite indicators. They can create multiple accounts and anonymously steal stuff up and down.
If you want to deter from stealing elite indicators, there should not be elite indicators. All code should be freely available to anyone on the site, because no one will pay for re-packaged indicators that they can get for free. None of my indicators are in the elite section, and most are also on the NT support site. You can take them and try to sell them, but any user who does even a little bit of due diligence should be able to find them free before dishing out any cash.
Vendors who want to grab content would not come in as vendors.
Participants who actually admit to being vendors would not resort to that..I think.
Matt
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I don't think that keeping vendors out of the elite section would be a sufficient deterrent for the activities you would be attempting to prevent. The bad people would still do bad things, but good people would be removed from the elite conversations.
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Maybe we could start a futures.io (formerly BMT) Black List. If we find ANY vendor who has hijacked futures.io (formerly BMT) work, we could list them on the Black List.
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as one recently adorned with the Purple-V (should i now hang my head in shame? haha) ... i think that @Luger's comment pretty much sums up my thinking.
imo, the futures.io (formerly BMT) community does an incredibly good job of policing itself and calling b******t on anything that smells fishy.
perhaps you could add a question to your registration that explicitly asks if you are a vendor. there was no such checkbox that i recall when i registered.
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I love this democracy and free for all. Some get away with the biggest crimes.
According to the Sharia Law, you must cut the left hand of the thief the first time he steals and the right hand for the second time, and so on. Nothing is more severe than adultery (equivalent to stealing indicators), they chop the head off.
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As an elite member i have to say something,I spent lots and lots of $$$ buying Indicators from Vendors and
after i become an Elite members i found out that whatever i bought from those "Vendors"were in futures.io (formerly BMT) for $50
(for a life time).As much as its made me mad and upset,i am happy that i found GOOD members and Vendors
Like @Fat Tails,However,any Vendor can pay $50 and become an Elite member,copy the indicators and sell them,
If he will be caught,he will ask his friend,wife,brother to become an Elite member and he will do it all over again!
I don't think there is any way to stop it
I just hope that more traders will know about futures.io (formerly BMT),sign up and enjoy the benefits for their own good and not
be fool like i was
I think this is the way to go. For reasons that others have explained, preventing vendors from becoming elite members doesn't really work on a practical level. But maintaining a Black List might deter any potential criminal vendor from stealing as it could threaten them with a loss of credibility to a large potential user base and hurt their business.
While any user could point to a potential offender for others to review, Mike would have to be the final arbiter of whether a vendor makes the Black List or not.
Learn The Rules Well So You Can Break Them Effectively
Seems the only thing gained by any effort to police the theft of elite work would keep the honest...honest but do nothing to deter the dishonest.
You can't legislate behavior.
Rules do very little to influence the people who care about the difference between right and wrong.
Rules do very little to influence the people who DO NOT care about the difference between right and wrong.
Just a few of my random thoughts that probably mean very little...
I say let them join and police them after they screw up.
I encountered also "Robin Hood" programmers who also rip-off honest vendors and post it on forums.
Sadly, dishonesty can come from many directions.
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Last April I was in Roger Felton's trading room for about 4 weeks. At one point he said he was working with volumn indicators and called them "proprietary" and would not show these charts or indicators in his free trading room. At one point he was talking to Clint, his assistant, and called these indicators by name--Gomi.
Here is a man that was charging $3,500 up front than $300 per month for his indicators. But yet he called Gomi's work Proprietary. He did not code these and they were not even his idea.
Roger wqs an elite member and has done two seminars for futures.io (formerly BMT). As it is, it is easy enough to take any indicator and sell it as your own. I do not believe that elite vendors will prevent the theft of indicators, but will have the opposite effect. We are giving these for profit companies the keys to the front door.
It would be great if a professional wants to educate us with unbiased information. I am not sure how to seperate the information from a soft sell of his services.
Keep things as simple as possible, but no simplier. Albert Einstein
If you can't explain it to an eight year old it's to complicated
I attended one of Roger Felton's webinars a few weeks ago because it was touting his awesome new Renko bars. The moment I saw the bars I realized, (in my sole opinion), they were an implementation of @RJay's bars. To be fair, I'm sure they didn't steal RJay's code, but just implemented an idea that was not originally their own. But I think it still illustrates, that if a piece of code is only available to an 'elite', then someone is gonna steal or reverse-engineer it and sell it to the 'non-elite'. To deter them from doing it, you have to make it available freely to all, only then will no one be willing to pay for it.
I think there are 2 distinct issues here. How do you entice people to become elite members? and how do you deter people from stealing elite code? I think elite threads and webinars is the answer to the first question, and making all indicators available to everyone is the answer to the second.
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monpere's on the right track: define your problem and discover your solution.
Problem: vendors steal code from futures.io (formerly BMT) and sell it Victim: Not us, really, but the poor schmoe who just bought a repackaged indicator. Solution: make all indicators freely available, and make an effort to let that fact be known far and wide. Mission: Stick it to the unscrupulous on behalf of the unsuspecting Roadblock: there is a sucker born every minute Unintended Consequences: people will need other reasons to become an elite member besides indicators, or people might be less inclined to share code if they know it's going to quickly be all over the internet.
So the real questions are:
1) Can Mike entice elite members without indicators? (That's a question for Mike, really, but monpere had some ideas)
2) Would people share less code if code were freely available?
3) And does that matter?
As far as the second question is concerned: ask the productive members.
And as far as the third question is concerned: my personal view is that it doesn't really matter. Right now I think the way futures.io (formerly BMT) is constructed works for its mission. It's a place not to collaborate on an edge, but to get an education: to see the baloney debunked, to ferret out the successful traders and take them as models, to discover different styles of trading, to pick up some technological skill.
It's the water to which the horse is led but cannot be made to drink. And Mike has already done a good job of making sure that vendors don't poison the well.
-RK
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Mike i think you'll realize after reading through the commentaries that restricting vendors of elite membership would not solve the pirating mentioned. A number of vendors here have made great presentations and their insight has helped many. Its pretty obvious that a number of vendors have taken ideas here and put there own twist to say.
To be fair (I am a member of Roger's room and have his software) - they do mention that they sometimes use the GOMI indicator but they say it by name and tell the folks they can go to futures.io (formerly BMT) to get it. It is clearly listed as a separate item you can choose to download (from futures.io (formerly BMT)) when you download Roger's DivPro software. I haven't been to Roger's room in months, but I assume it is still presented the same way. And it wasn't used on the charts when I was there.
I think that vendors should be allowed to become Elite members as several of them do provide good info and sometimes indicators. I agree with the blacklist policy several have mentioned.
Mike, did you create a poll for this? Sorry if I missed it.
Ninjatrader.com has the same issue than BigMike for the code related to indicators and Strategies which is posted (hosted) by forum members in their Support forum as per this link :
Thanks, i think this is a great analogy. There are problems for which there is no single solution and stealing is one of them. futures.io (formerly BMT) should instead focus on its mission and emphasize education and how to develop trading expertise. The importance of indicators should be minimized although i suspect most people become elite member to have access to specific indicators.
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Let everyone in to enjoy the free range, but if vendors steal then publicly blacklist them on top of the home page like the State Department's list of terrorist groups. Hard to get off that list with the public and 35k futures.io (formerly BMT) members watching.
As long as we post open source code... it will make it's way across the internet ... but at least if they have to be elite to gain access ... it helps support the site...
I say we keep Elite just like it is....
But then again .... @mattz was mean to me in another thread ... so I want to change my vote about vendors...
I'm just a simple man trading a simple plan.
My daddy always said, "Every day above ground is a good day!"
As a certified 'evil vendor', I shall give my 2c...
I'm not sure if any existing vendor has stolen code from here OR if the issue is non-vendors coming along, seeing what is here & deciding to make a business out of it.
That should guide the decision somewhat.
If anyone wants to register as a non-vendor then they can, and so vendors could create a sign-in and get in anyway.
So - it's very tricky to keep them (us) out.
It's also tricky to vet every vendor and have an 'approved' list. Also that approval might be taken the wrong way by regular members.
I think that anyone found re-distributing the code should get the boot but in short, I'm not sure how you'd protect the code other than locking the code & licensing it.
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I don't think anybody thinks vendors are evil - it's just that many of us know, either through common sense or bitter experience, that grifters and suckers are the yin and yang tattooed on trading's underbelly.
You're right about the basic facts: you can't keep seedy vendors out anymore than you can keep open code in.
We just have to remember that the internet is a public space, and $50 is not a significant enough hurdle to change that. So before any of us posts code, we should weigh how much we want to help others in this interesting but anonymous community against how much it would bother us to see our work become free R&D for somebody else's business.
best,
RK
(your posts have been helpful to me, by the way, Dionysus, so I'm glad you're here - and great handle)
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futures.io (formerly BMT) is a phenomenal resource for both learning and advanced traders. The exchange of ideas and help provided by all should not be changed at all. I am amazed by the process of an idea for an indicator or a change to an indicator working its way through the process. ( if you could make it do this--- here try that--- that's almost it--- how about now) this is fantastic and then having the results of those efforts available for all to try out to see if they could be of use or not at no expense other than the initial elite fee is great.
Everyone involved with the evolution and operation of this forum should be extremely proud of their efforts and results. Extreme care should be taken before changes are made. If it ain't broke don't fix it
Thanks for all your efforts, insight and time
Erik
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Do you know why locks were invented? To keep honest people honest. As long as the code for the indicators is open source (free) there is going to be people who take advantage of it, they will take it, change it around a little and call it there own. We all know that there is no holy grail, but for those who make their living sailing indicators and education BM is the holy grail. I am not saying all vendors are evil. The question I would like to see is "What vendors that are elite members have a product or service that is legit?" I know that this can be a hard thing to evaluate, but from my point of view when I joined futures.io (formerly BMT) I was not looking for the greatest indicator or system, I was and still am looking for the best education. (For those of you who will chime in and tell me to read lots of books or troll my way through the forms "DON'T" that is not my learning style) I would think that with all the great people that are here at futures.io (formerly BMT) there would be some way to evaluate these vendors and assign ratings. That's my 2cents.
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I agree with the concept of protecting the code. Keeping vendors or "future vendors" off of the elite section I don't think solves anything.
Unfortunately, protecting the code (which defeats the purpose of the open source concept) will help. I am not a strong advocate of DLLs on futures.io (formerly BMT) although I have seen many "contributors" resort to only distributing the DLL, which I thought was against the rules on futures.io (formerly BMT).
I think the only way to slow down (can't prevent) theft is by the "licensing agreement". If futures.io (formerly BMT) had a "futures.io (formerly BMT) License" and the desire to defend violations of that license (file suit) then we would have something to fall back on. In reality, I don't picture @Big Mike hiring a legal firm to protect the code posted for Elite membership use only.
I see no good coming from a list of good/bad vendors ....
A member has a bad experience with a vendor and then blames futures.io (formerly BMT) since the vendor was on the "approved" list.
A member with a personal grievance against a vendor , vents his spleen on futures.io (formerly BMT) and gets the vendor on the bad list. The vendor supplies documentation to show the accusations are untrue and decides to " lawyer up".
The current system works. Vendors that contribute to the board are welcome and those that break the rules are booted to the curb.
I'm just a simple man trading a simple plan.
My daddy always said, "Every day above ground is a good day!"
