IMPORTANT: New subscription plans

Dear All,

Because of some changes to our agreement with Standard & Poor’s, we have revised our pricing structure and launched new membership plans.

If you are currently a paying individual user, you should not notice any changes to your account. Some older memberships will see a small price increase, but there will be no change to features. You will no longer be able to upgrade or downgrade between these older membership levels.

If you are currently a paying professional user with Assets Under Management (AUM), your subscription will no longer auto renew. When your current term expires, you will be asked to choose from our new professional plans. Please note that if you use P123 to manage over $50M AUM, you will need a separate S&P license. This license starts at $24,000/year.

If you are a research provider your subscription will no longer auto renew, and you will be required to choose from our new plans.

If your account is affected by these changes, you will receive an email with more details separately.

We value your business.

Thank you for being our customer.

The introduction of a resource schedule represents a huge price increase!

The closest replacement for the Designer level is Portfolio and that level is allocated only 1000 resource units. With each Live Portfolio & Book costing 10 units, just accounting for the current 100 port Designer limit would consume all the available credits and extra dollars needed to pay for simulations, ranking systems, and formulas.

Wow!

Just, wow!

Walter

Marco,

can you please confirm that a “designer” level will be able to stay “designer” going forward at the upcoming renewal term (and keeping the same features as before i.e. no ‘resource schedule’ etc). I think this is what you imply but not 100% sure.
Or will we be forced to migrate to the new membership levels at renewal?

I also notice that the new Portfolio level does not allow Variable Position Sizing which I am currently using on my Live ports (e.g. real money). That would mean that I would be forced to upgrade to Ultimate.

Thank you

Jerome

P123 just sent out an email that adds some clarity;
“Your current subscription will no longer be available to new customers. Note that you should not notice any changes to your account, but you will no longer be able to upgrade or downgrade between these membership levels.”

Walter

I hope that the new agreement with S&P gives you international data too!

The Portfolio (aka old Designer) level ($134/month) does not seem to include the optimizer nor rolling tests. I hope you reconsider that, please.

Some clarification that existing users are grandfathered in and will not lose their current features would be nice.

Edit: Found this comparison when clicking upgrade.


Seems like we are grandfathered based on PortfolioPerfection plans. I have the Professional legacy plan, I have no clue what it corresponds to but it seems to be on the same level as Designer?

P123:

 I have not received an email.  Does that mean I'm not affected?

Bill

Let me get this straight. If I remain at the designer level, I get data going back to 1999. If I upgrade to the ultimate level, I only get data going back to 5/2003 (15 years). What the heck?

yuvaltaylor - that’s why you want to keep your legacy membership plan active

strader1 - I’ve re-sent your email to the address associated with your account

jmh - you will be able to stay on the Designer (Legacy) plan

Quantonomics - your plan named “Professional (Legacy)” will continue but does not correspond directly with the new plans.

All:
Legacy subscriptions plans for individual account types will continue as is but if you want to modify your plan for any reason you’ll have to pick one of the currently active plans.
Legacy subscriptions for Research and Professional Asset Manager account types will not renew and those users will have to pick one of the new plans available to them upon bill renewal.

What is the definition of a quant engine request?

Hi Ted

Existing designers with a pro status (now Asset Managers) should be at least grandfathered in terms of resource units and backtesting until 1999 for stocks. Can you confirm?

Otherwise I would have to go through hundreds of older sims to delete them.
Generally, resource unit settings are way too restrictive or the calculations way to high.

It is okay if you adjust your pricing terms for new subscribers and existing designers that are asset managers, but you cannot take away data (4 years+) and force us to delete all kinds of systems when we like to add new ones.

Please clarify.

Thanks
Whotookmynickname

PS: Could you please also provide a short comment on EU data now that you seem to have negotiated some kind of deal with S&P?
PS: Will the download API be provided by P123 and give us access to our ranking systems, ports, holdings, transactions, etc? Or is this S&P’s?

$15,000 per month revenue for the first research tier??

Come on. So much for the small business person.

I would highly recommend a lower revenue research tier. Otherwise, it will drive some of us to other platforms or make our business unviable to continue using P123.

Paul

Taking into account that the last ten years are very similar in terms of “what have worked”, “No recessions”, etc., loosing the first 4 years of the data (1999-2003) is very painful. I always expected that the more time we are using P123, the more data with high quality is available, not the other way round.

I would also recommend to leave a period before changing this pricing policy. I was recommending some friends to get an account. With the new situation is going to be very difficult. P123 should let them to get the former offers within the following month at least.

More information is needed, but it seems that for the future it means a loss and not an improvement. Anyway, I am sure you will listean our requests. So thank you in advance.

Who is your target individual client for the first 2 tiers? It has no ability to either run live or simulated strategies. What is their intended use of p123?

This is impossible. I’ve just become a “research provider,” ten days ago. I put in months of hard work developing my plan, and now I have to cancel the whole project and make my subscribers very unhappy because I’m unwilling to lose the data from 1999 to 2004. It’s insane to make this data suddenly unavailable. That is the only bear market we have to study since the GFC was so uncharacteristic. And using that data is the only way I can perform correlation studies between two entirely separate periods.

I just can’t fathom the logic behind restricting any subscribers to 15 years. 19 years was already barely sufficient, but 15 is nuts. Nobody can develop a reliable strategy based on such a short window.

@YuvalTaylor

The logic behind this move is stated in the first line: S&P is unhappy on how PRO users are handled on P123 because they are not paying enough and this is cannibalizing the sales of their own backtesting engine S&P Clarify.

We got calls from S&P where they bullied us to buy their $24,000 / year licence or they unplug us themselves from P123. We proved them we didnt have $50M AUM. They were pissed we fell in a loophole so they invented these tiers.

By increasing the fees for PRO users and restricting to 15 years, S&P expect either of these two scenarios: 1) convert PRO users to S&P Clarify, their backtest engine or 2) earn money out of P123 as much as they do on S&P Clarify.

Our firm was dependent on S&P data last year. They take advantage of you if they know it. We switched to Factset as they offered the same data quality for half the price. I dont know if Factset got PIT, maybe P123 should check.

It would also be important for us users to understand, what was forced by S&P, and what is P123’s decision. For example, the resource unit limits and calculations are totally off and I just don’t see any reason for introducing them.

The (very, very few) data providers out there know they provide the data that the 3rd party vendors are built on, and aren’t going to be content just making money by being mere data providers forever. It was only an amount of time before they created their own services, and strong arm everyone into using their services as well (S&P Capital IQ). Especially in an age when “factor investing” and “beta strategies” are on the front pages of Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal every day. They’re not in the business of empowering competitors.