Last updated 4 October 2026.
This site and any commissioned work are provided by Richard Hodgson, trading as Point of Control — a sole trader (not a limited company) based in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. Contact: [email protected].
Prices and VAT. All prices are quoted in pounds sterling and exclude VAT. I am not VAT registered, so no VAT is charged and none is recoverable on my invoices. If that changes, prices quoted before the change are honoured.
I am not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, and nothing I provide — on this site or in commissioned work — is a personal recommendation, investment advice, or a regulated activity of any kind.
Everything on this site — the tools, the lessons, the glossary — is free, and provided for education and simulation only. It is not financial advice. The full disclaimer sets this out properly and applies in full.
The site is provided as it is. I make no guarantee that it will be available, accurate or error-free, and I am not liable for any decision taken on the basis of anything it produces. Every number it shows comes from a model or from data you typed in yourself.
These terms apply to paid technical work unless we agree something different in writing.
Technical services: coding, testing, data infrastructure and written analysis, on a strategy or specification you provide. Each engagement has its scope agreed in writing before it starts, including what is out of scope.
No investment advice, no recommendations, no signals, and no management of money or accounts. I do not advise on what to trade, when to trade it, or whether you should. I make no claim, promise or projection about future returns.
Testing a strategy is not an endorsement of it. A result that looks favourable is a historical simulation, and historical simulation does not predict real outcomes. Any decision to risk real money is yours alone, and I accept no liability for trading losses.
You are a consumer if you are buying for purposes outside a business, trade or profession. Most individual traders are. If you are, you have a legal right to cancel within 14 days of the contract being made, for any reason, and get your money back. You do not have to give a reason. To cancel, email me — a plain sentence is enough.
If you want me to start inside those 14 days, you have to ask me to, and the scope document records that you did. If you then cancel before the work is finished, you pay only for the part already done, in proportion to the full price, and I refund the rest. Once the work is finished — having asked me to start early and acknowledged that this ends the cancellation right — the right to cancel no longer applies.
Refunds are made by the same method you paid, within 14 days. Nothing in these terms removes or limits your rights under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 or the Consumer Rights Act 2015. If you are buying as a business, this section does not apply to you.
Half on acceptance of the scope, half on delivery, unless agreed otherwise. Fixed-price work is quoted for the agreed scope; changes to the scope are re-quoted rather than absorbed.
Third-party costs — market data purchases, for example — are passed on at cost and agreed before they are incurred.
Invoices are payable within 14 days. If an invoice is overdue I may pause work and withhold delivery until it is settled. For business customers, statutory interest and compensation under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 apply to overdue invoices. I will always ask before I chase.
Please look at the deliverable when it arrives. If something does not match the scope we agreed, tell me within 14 days and I will put it right at no charge. After 14 days the work is treated as accepted and further changes are quoted as new work. This does not affect your legal rights where something is genuinely not as described.
Either of us can end an engagement in writing at any time. If you end it, you pay for the work done up to that point and I hand over what exists, in whatever state it is in. If I end it — other than for non-payment or a breach by you — I refund anything you have paid for work not yet done. If you are a consumer, the cancellation section above comes first and this one does not cut it down.
Confidentiality, intellectual property and the limits on liability carry on applying after an engagement ends.
You own your strategy, your data and your idea — commissioning me does not change that, and nothing you send me becomes mine.
You receive the code written for your engagement, together with the report and instructions to reproduce the result. Ownership of that work passes to you when the invoice is paid in full, not on delivery. Before then you may evaluate it but not put it into production or pass it on. In practice this matters only if an invoice goes unpaid.
I retain my own pre-existing tooling — research engine, audit scripts, templates and infrastructure — which is used to carry out the work but is not transferred with it. I will not trade your strategy, disclose it, or re-use it for another client.
Anything you send me stays between us. I will not name you, quote your strategy, or use your engagement as a case study without your written agreement, and I will not trade your strategy or re-use it for anyone else.
How AI tools fit into that, stated plainly. AI coding and analysis tools are used in this work, as they are across software development now, and it would be misleading to promise confidentiality without saying so. It means material you send me — your specification, your code, your data — may be processed by those tools in the course of the work.
They are used under commercial terms that do not permit your content to be used to train models, and everything they produce is checked by me before it goes anywhere near a deliverable — that checking is most of what you are paying for. Your material is not shared with anyone else, published, or used for another client either way.
If you would rather an engagement ran without them, say so before we agree scope. I will tell you honestly whether I can do it, and what it changes about the price and the time it takes.
Work is handed over complete and documented. I do not monitor client systems. Where an engagement includes alerting, those alerts report to you, not to me.
There is no service-level agreement and no guaranteed response time. Nothing here is a support contract or a maintenance agreement. If something needs attention after handover, ask and I will quote for it as separate work, or decline it. Keeping a system running is yours.
The optional monthly backup service copies data you already hold to storage I control, and checks once a month that the copy arrived and is readable. That is the whole of it.
It is a second copy, not your primary one. You remain responsible for your own live data and your own recovery. I give no guarantee of availability or completeness, and my liability for any loss of backed-up data is limited to the backup fees you have paid.
You confirm you are permitted to have the data copied under your own agreements with your exchange and data vendor. I store it on your behalf; I do not inspect it, trade from it, use it in my own research, or pass it to anyone. On cancellation it is returned to you if you ask, then deleted.
Where work involves recording or acquiring market data, that data is produced under your own agreement with the exchange or vendor. I provide software, setup and monitoring. I do not supply, resell or redistribute exchange market data.
I will tell you in advance if a piece of work is outside what I can deliver, and decline it. Where my liability cannot be excluded by law it is limited to the fee paid for the engagement in question. Nothing here limits liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction — except where you are a consumer, in which case you keep whatever protection and whatever local courts the law of your own country gives you. That is not something I could take away by writing it here, so it is written here instead.
Richard Hodgson, trading as Point of Control · Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
[email protected]