Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the future of this indicator. Its not an easy decision to make, but as the author you obviously have the unquestioned right to distribute it in whatever form and under whatever conditions you feel comfortable with - even if that means keeping it entirely to yourself. I'm sure everyone here would like to have free access to it, including me, but no-one would argue with whatever choice you make.
Personally I don't buy the argument that giving it away would soon change how markets behave and make the tool useless. I've heard that before, but out of the thousands of forex indicators & trading systems out there I'm yet to see one that it holds true for. By way of example, the Turtle system applied to long-term charts still works just as well now as it did 30 years ago, and its been public knowledge for a long time now. When you think about it, the argument just doesn't make sense. If everyone started trading that one indicator at the exclusion of all else, and the effect was that it ceased to work, well soon enough everyone would stop trading it & it'd get a bad reputation, people would move on to other methods - and then it'd start working again
Instead I'd look at it from the point of view that developing this indicator has taken you time & effort, and perhaps know-how that most other people don't possess. Using the indicator, it may be possible to make money from the markets. Therefore making it freely available means you carry that cost and others profit from it, which is incredibly altruistic. There's nothing wrong with that, there's plenty of indicators & EAs (including most on this site) where the authors have freely shared their knowledge & work - but that doesn't mean you should feel beholden to do so if you're not comfortable with it.
So if you do make it freely available, I applaud you and would add you to my small list of "forex heroes". If not, then the question is whether you want to make it available at all. I assume you do, else this thread has been a cruel tease that us readers don't really deserve. The question would therefore be the terms under which you'd want to release it. There's two paths you can choose between - making the indicator available, or selling a signals service using it & keeping the indicator under wraps. Both would give you income to compensate for your work in developing it, and keep the audience of traders small in case you're worried about the "everyone using it & it stops working" scenario.
If you make it available, you'll want to move the vital functionality into a separate DLL so people can't de-compile, and you'll also want to have some form of key-based access tied to the buyer's machine so that if its pirated & distributed by someone else it won't work. You may or may not want to go to all that effort. If all you're asking is a small donation to a paypal account, you probably wouldn't bother. You definitely would if you want to sell it for $100 or more.
Selling signals is the alternative, which Empty4 makes relatively simple these days (as does myfxbook) and I believe there's a section on this site for that as well.
Anyway, please let us know what you decide.
cheers,
-Slip.
