We take the view that the word audit means something very specific in the realm of accounting. It is not so easily applied by those who are other than accountants even when strict guidelines are followed. The question is raised, who sets the standard for an audit. Rather than argue this point, we just don’t use the word. All the results we publish are verified and are derived from real money accounts and not simply manager-reported numbers. It is accurate for a manager to say that the results we publish are independent third party verified results. 

No, that would introduce the possibility of “manager fiddling” which is the technical term for “changing the data”. One of the ways we are able to represent the manager performance and risk profiles as authentic is by getting statements directly from the custodian or directly from the custodian’s web platform. You say, “But, I would never fiddle with the statements!” We say, “Of course you wouldn’t!” But it is those pesky subscribers and customers that make us do it this way.

We have had managers tell us that their BD forbids them from making comments or posting online since all written communication from the IA or the manager must go through the BD compliance department first. Certainly, the BD has some say as to how the manager represents themselves publicly. But on our site, the manager has the ability to use a screen name that does not reveal his identity unless he chooses to reveal it. Using the “Your Profile” link, registered and logged in members can edit the name which appears publicly on our site and in our forums. Using a non-identifying email address such as one from yahoo or gmail is also a good idea. When a manager uses these conveniences, he is anonymous to the rest of the members of our forums and can join the discussions and post to his heart’s content without violating any compliance diktats. No compliance department in the world can forbid someone from commenting anonymously anymore than they can forbid the manager from teaching Sunday School.

We do some of it for nothing, such as providing the discussion forums here. The rest of what we do, we try to make a little money at so that we can continue to do it.

There are several factors which determine how much we charge managers to track their models. Monthly tracking costs less than Daily tracking. There are tiered pricing levels if a manager has us tracking multiple accounts. But you really want a dollars and cents answer, don’t you. Ok, monthly tracking services start at $150/year for a single account. Daily tracking services start at $300/year for a single account. Prices go down from there.

No sensitive or private information is ever published, distributed or sold by Theta to anyone anywhere anytime. We have a tracking agreement document that spells out our privacy policy and our responsibilities in handling data like this. 

Here are a few benefits:

1. You will have independently verified performance and risk statistics to show prospects
2. You will be permitted to bring prospects to Theta’s website where they will see only your information
3. You will have access to reports showing who and how often has looked at what models that we track of yours
4. This is a very cost-efficient way to verify your returns.
5. There are more charts and statistics available from Theta than most managers develop and analyze for themselves on their own programs.
6. You determine which models we track are available for viewing to prospects.
7. You will have the ability to add “reps” to your account who will have permanent access to view and/or update your information (you set the permission level). This allows you to keep wholesalers up to date on you models and permits them to bring prospects to Theta’s site to see only your data.

Oh, we could go on and on, but there are just a few benefits to managers.

After we shoot him and drag him through the streets behind our horse, we inquire gently as to the reason for the error and give him an opportunity to correct it. Our data validation processing catches most manual data entry errors in the first pass and returns the submission form automatically to the manager with information about the errors. Repeated errors may result in a temporary de-listing from our site and ongoing or flagrant errors may result in a permanent de-listing and public flogging.

Our data processing routines run nearly all day long. However, in order to give custodians time to process their end-of-day transactional data and get it posted and delivered, we run our main data collection and processing early each morning that follows a market day. Our websites are usually updated by 10:00am Eastern time on weekdays and by noon on Saturdays.

If a manager wants to be tracked on a daily basis, he must trade an account at Rydex Funds or at ProFunds. Monthly tracking can be done on accounts trading at any custodian or any platform provided Theta is given web access to the account tracked or at the least is able to receive duplicate or “other-interested-party” (OIP) statements directly from the custodial firm (electronic is preferred but hard-copies by mail are grudgingly accepted, too).

You and your reps and prospects will have free access to your data at all times. We find that managers are the first to spot any data errors and that serves as a very good vetting process for us in catching custodial errors as they arise. Additionally, Theta’s paid subscribers will have access to the data through our Subscriber website. This is one of the way’s we stay in business. If you would like not to have us publish your data, let us know but we will charge you more to track the model since it will not provide revenue to us from any other source.

No, our only subscription terms are annual. There is a reason for this. Having provided monthly subscriptions in the past we found 2 things were true. 1. Subscribers frequently used the site for a month. found a manager or two they liked and then dropped their subscriptions. Good for them...bad for us. 2. Pricing our monthly subscriptions at a price that allowed us to stay in business, meant very few subscribers signed up. The annual subscription rates are reasonable (we think) and we encourage subscribers to use the service all year to monitor their managers to see if their own accounts match the accounts we are tracking and to compare the managers they choose with others who might have just started with us. Our subscriber renewal rate is quite high telling us that the price is fair and that our subscribers are finding value in the service we are providing.

When a manager contracts with us to track his model(s), we collect data in one of two ways. If the data is daily transactional data, we receive login permission from the manager to directly access a custodial website where the account is being traded. Then, every morning we automatically login to those websites, download the previous days transactions and resulting position information, import it into our databases, and then reconcile our data with the custodian’s. If the data is monthly, we ask the manager to submit a spreadsheet to us each month which our systems automatically validate and process. This is followed by Theta manually verifying the submitted data either by matching to an account statement we receive directly from the custodian or by accessing a custodial webpage where we check electronic account information against the information submitted by the manager.

See our subscription page for more information. We offer different levels of functionality to subscribers based on their needs.

We update the data daily.

We have tested our site with Internet Explorer 6.0 and above and Firefox 1.5 and above. We will not say that our site will not work with browsers older than these versions but we are using technology that is rarely supported in older browsers and IE is very quirky below 7.0 anyway. So, if you are using an older version...come on, stop being a Luddite and upgrade.

Our data processing routines run nearly all day long. However, in order to give custodians time to process their end-of-day transactional data and get it posted and delivered, we run our main data collection and processing early each morning that follows a market day. Our websites are usually updated by 10:00am Eastern time on weekdays and by noon on Saturdays.