As I draw closer to pulling the trigger on Kickstarter, it occurs to me that I may need to justify a few things – things that no user would care about (but I’m doing them anyway).

1. 60 minute settlement: usually, settlement happens behind the scenes and most users don’t really see the impact of this. They know (vaguely) that after selling a stock they own, it might take a couple of days for it to “disappear” from their list of positions. Most exchanges settle T+3 (or Trade Date plus 3 days) which indicates when the two custodians (the guys who hold the stocks on behalf of the user) exchange the money and the shares. It’s invisible, boring and entirely necessary to facilitate settlement without ending up in chaos. Massive Rainfall settles everything within the hour (and it’s easy since it’s all within the same entity).
2. Three dimensional (3D) securities. Each security has three ways to derive its price – temperature, wind speed and precipitation. At settlement, it needs to be clear which derivation is used to move money around (as well as at expiry). This reduces the number of securities (boring) and makes it trickier to settle/expiry (yawn). This could be brilliant, stupid – but probably just uninteresting. Later we may add more derivations.
3. https – similar to the heavily encrypted protocols used by all major banks (or all banks, hopefully), I’ve disallowed any non-https connections to my site – even to my blog. This should provide comfort to anyone providing sensitive information to my site. Also – don’t provide sensitive information to my site for the moment. I don’t need it, and when I do, I’ll ask for it.
4. No short sales, no Icebergs, no AllOrNone, no Client Reporting, small list of cities, blah blah blah – there’s too many things to do all at once. I prioritized what I thought was important. Users will likely completely disagree. So tell me…

So… much… work.