Chat updates, shared repos, and a new subscriber tier.
There has been a lot of discussion about changes, but I think I've finally got it all figured out. No more changes... I promise... ;)
TL;DR:
New subscriber tier called Red Team ( Founding member or whatever).
Chat is now for paid subscribers but will have more content and threads discussing strategies and trading.
Current Annual subscribers will be grand-fathered in and maintain GitHub access. If you upgrade to annual before Saturday, the 19th (0000 hours), you will also be able to keep or get GitHub access.
After grace period for annual subscribers, users who wish to have access to GitHub and some exclusive content on chat will have to upgrade to a Red Team membership.
Annual subscribers who are grand-fathered in during the grace period will only have access to the GitHub. Any content posted on the chat for Red Team/founders members won’t be accessible. This is because I can’t “gift” you an upgrade to the new tier.
Man, I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out how to keep a few extra benefits going for subscribers lately. If' you have been in the chat, you know what I am talking about. Some of you were even kind enough to test drive a private forum I was thinking about using (not entirely off the table). All of this started when I began to realize that manually managing my users and GitHub users was becoming too cumbersome (and I don’t have THAT many paid subscribers). I saw the writing on the wall. It would become unmanageable in the not too distant future.
So, I got to talking about it on the chat and we had some subscribers chime in with some good ideas. One that stuck out to me was this one from
:Annual subscribers get access to all strategies while monthly only get access to those strategies released from that month onwards?
And this one from
:Some people offer a higher-tier annual membership plan, most are called "Founding Member Plan", in addition to the standard annual membership.
I am not too fond of some of the pricing schemes I see in this field. Many people might believe that I am missing out by only charging $19 a month. It feels better than constantly changing the rate of my newsletter though.
The first suggestion is not a terrible idea, but it does mean that there would be a time window that strategies are available and new subscribers wouldn’t have access to historical strategies. This isn’t off the table, but I would prefer to keep the entire archive open if possible.
The second suggestion is essentially suggesting to use the Founder’s tier subscription to limit the access to the extras that come with being a paid subscriber to HGT. This could work to make managing users on GitHub easier.
I am calling this subscription tier “Red Team”.
That lead me to these ideas:
Lean into the Substack system. Take advantage of an exclusive chat feature for paid members and have a secondary tier (Red Team) to keep some threads, like custom strategy design or active trading journals, exclusive to Red Team members.
Limit access to the GitHub to the Red Team. This will mean that many of the current monthly subscribers will lose access to the GitHub and any new monthly subscribers will not have access to the repo.
Continue attaching code to posts as is currently being done and make sure strategy criteria is written out as plainly as possible. Describe math where necessary so people can recreate the strategies in their own backtesting environment.
Just so there is no confusion. Any post with a strategy, research, indicator, or anything else that required code will have the code associated with the post. Regular monthly and annual (discounted two months, sometimes more) will be able to access these posts as they are released and retroactively in the archive. What they will not have access to is the GitHub and any updated code that comes after the initial post.
Red Team members will have access to the community GitHub and exclusive live chat threads (like my live trade journal when I am trading) and exclusive chats regarding user created strategies and research. These members will also have access to the pyQuantTools (PQT) library that I am working on. They will be able to fork and help develop (if they want) any features the community wants.
I will still be documenting my process of building this library, providing code along with my posts. So, any subscriber, whether monthly, annual, or Red Team, will have access to the codes and the concepts during the creation phase. A little skill and research and it shouldn’t be too hard to create your own library of tools to assist with research. I will never post and idea or plan without having accompanying code. The code blocks in Substack leave a little more to be desired, but they are good enough for now. If I find a way to share files, I will, but it will be ephemeral and the file downloads won’t remain active forever.
If you are an annual member and you wish to upgrade to Red Team. Perhaps you want to see those sweet exclusive chat threads or perhaps you just want to show your support for my work, the system should prorate the different from what you have already paid and how much time you have left on your subscription. Your access to the GitHub will remain active, but I can’t get around the chat features if something gets posted for “Red Team” members.
If you think this plan stinks, shoot me a DM.
Happy trading.