Hi Group,

I'm curious as to whether this product has always been $299 or if it has been free in the past? Or do some people get it for free?

I spoke to Equis today and am extremely surprised that they are charging for it. I'm currently running a successful software development consultancy in London (to the financial sector) and have been in the industry for over 10 years. One thing I've seen is that a product's success can be boosted by allowing third parties to create add-on enhancements. Metastock is a good product and has good hooks to allow these enhancements. However it simply does not make sense for them to penalise developers for choosing to enhance their product.

Two very good examples of programming solutions which have taken the market by storm over the past five years are Java and Microsoft's .Net. Both free and have both significantly benefited their creating groups - Sun etc sale of Solaris etc, Microsoft sale of Windows Server and Desktop environments.

I'm sure that the revenue gained from MDK sales is tiny compared to the sales of their Metastock sales. Perhaps 100 or even 1000 times being conservative! Sure, releasing this product to developers would result in a very small loss of revenue for MDK but this would be strongly outweighed by improvement to Metastock, increased sales and hype, commissions on selling add-ons and customer satisfaction.

For every 100 developers prepared to try MDK and potentially improve the Metastock environment I would be willing to be that 99 of them never get a chance to explore the MDK as they don't want to outlay cash before even seeing the product. Lost potential.

When I spoke to Paul at Equis today he suggested that developers should 'roll the dice' (his words), and gamble $299 that they might get some benefit from it.

Did you all pay for it? Am I missing something? Are there any other products that developers can use to compile dlls for use as Metastock plugins?

Stewart

For a product as stagnant (almost two years since the last release, which itself was nothing but a Vista-compatibility bugfix) and obsolete (really? we still can't drag child windows outside the limited confines of the main window, nor take advantage of multiple monitors?) as MetaStock, they sure are protective of that MDK, aren't they? Companies with a supported, enthusiastic developer base usually do very well compared to competitors. Your take on it has been noted previously on this forum by others.

Yes, I use MetaStock (version 9.1 because there's zero reason to upgrade), but it's slipping further and further behind. Everytime Alexander Elder releases another book or newsletter with screenshots of TradeStation, I get a little jealous of the features I see him using.

So Brandon, is anything at all happening to modernize this aging product, or is Reuters just flogging it to get a few more data subscribers?

[Brandon:] I can't seem to find the MDK page on our web site right now that contains the details on what it can and can't do

Well, that's not good. You work there. If they had any interest in really selling it and supporting a developer base, at the very minimum there'd be a detailed and complete datasheet and manual available for download before purchase.

Sigh.

"Jealous" was an unclear choice of word; that's why I changed it to "protective". And by that I meant Equis is treating the product as some kind of super-valuable treasure chest, when they should be trying to seed it far and wide to garner as many developers as possible to create a more-valuable core product. It's ok to charge *something* for a devkit because presumably you'd have to support it, but treating it like the Crown Jewels and making info hard to get doesn't benefit anybody.

A better approach would be to offer it free or very cheap, and unsupported, then charge for any support necessary and maybe also charge a "MetaStock Certified" fee to test developer's products and certify that they're functional (but not guaranteeing their investment performance).

It's all about creating a happy, motivated third-party developer base.

Brandon, thanks for the pointer to the MDK info page; it's pretty informative. I'm not a potential developer, but very happy to see the info there for those who are.

And FWIW, I like MetaStock 9.1 very much for what it is and think it's well worth what I paid for it, and for the few plugins I own. I just hate seeing it sit still unimproved in terms of the user interface and competitors' feature set.

In fact, I'm considering investing $1,200 in TradeSim Enterprise to perform functions well beyond the pitifully-limited backtesting included in MS. My personal opinion is that relying on the simplistic backtesting features of MS would likely lead one to very erroneous conclusions about system validity and performance. Of couse, I see other companies promoting their backtesting too, with similarly-limited capabilities.

Buy or license TradeSim, release MetaStock 11 with something like that, modernize the user interface, add a quotation window linked to whatever quote server and charts we're using now and voila - you've really got something.