Nitro, Let's say that your software scans 100,000 symbols and finds, say, 500 at any given time that meet your criteria. How do you manage this result set and narrow it down to the few symbols you'll actually trade? Thanks.
... Most traders should not require anything difficult to make a good living. Use what works: Most of the traders I know that do very well dont need supercomputer type resources and many of them outperform their peers who are using IMHO unnecessarily complicated analyses. Multiprocessing only gives benefits if the application you are using was written to take advantage of the capabilities of the hardware and this depends upon the nature of the problem being solved by the software. Database systems are typical off the shelf apps which can use the extra power - MS SQL Server, Oracle etc.
There isn't much trading software that is written in for dual processors computers. Highly complicated analysis leads to complicated trading theories, which leads to bad trading. Keep it simple. Sure do all of the complicated analysis you want ... in the end the only thing that makes a difference is if you're net positive.
It has nothing to do with analysis. Once you start tracking tens of thousands of symbols in RT, and execution speed becomes critical, even a simple MA calculation takes "forever." nitro
Don't you think that's overkill? When I was doing individual stocks, I searched through the entire NYSE and Naz lists to find ones with big enough share price and daily volume for suitable trading. I only found a little over 300. (I didn't know you could even GET RT data on the pink sheet issues.)
Please explain why a XEON would be better than a P4. (Maybe all of us traders would do ourselves well to be running XEONs??)
Actually that's not true. As noted in a previous post, most trading software will take advantage of dual processors because either the datafeed servicing code already runs in its own thread (as with the qcharts datafeed) or in a separate process (as with esignal and DTN). The issue (at least for trading software) isn't whether the software CAN use dual processors (because it can and will) but whether your workload is high enough that you need a dual because you can't get enough processing horsepower from a single processor (e.g., you need the equivalent of a 4 or 5 GHz P4 but you can't get one).
No - you never know where it will show up. Also, I think you are assuming that the symbols are equities. nitro