It's true, however in the case of @Laissez Faire asking about trading over a possibly unstable Wifi connection, a VPS would be very helpful because if their Wifi lost connection even for a moment, they could connect using mobile data on a different device and continue with the same trade. If your home internet connection or router needs to be restarted, your trading workspace on the server is always connected to your broker and data feed. If you have a local PC or internet problem, instantly switch to trading on mobile without missing the trade setup. In addition to running automated strategies, trading over a VPS is also beneficial to: Customers trading the US Markets from overseas Traders that have unstable internet connections at home (rural areas or do not have access to fast internet)
You can manually trade. And does very nice for automation, hell of lot better than when data stops or freezes at home, at least it still on the platform you are using.
A quick test in my new flat using the same software/web page @virtusa suggested. Any comments? I see some differences, but don't know how to interpret it. This is on a wi-fi connection with 30/30 Mb/s.
All looks good except for that first spike. Do the test a few times to see if have that spike each time or not. Latency is good and stable. Except for that spike, you get the same results as me. I have fiberglass cable connection. I will show you a chart after the market opened in RTH from the bandwith I need for NT8. At this moment it is below 50k, but markets are very calm now. You will never need your 30Mbps.
Your wifi test results look good. Trading over wifi is mostly fine, except in the rare case when the connection drops and the router/modem need to be restarted. I've personally experienced it with NinjaTrader ATM, and it can be replicated. For example, you place a limit buy order with an attached ATM strategy for profit target and stop loss. The connection drops at the exact moment when the limit order is triggered but before the ATM strategy has time to submit the stop loss. By the time you restart your connections, the market has moved strongly against you and way past where the protective stop loss would have been. For scalpers, you scalp long enough and everyone ends up experiencing a costly problem related to wifi. Another example is if your ATM strategy has additional order logic such as auto-breakeven or Auto-trail for stop loss. That logic only lives on your computer, and stops working in the event of a disconnect. So overall, trading on Wifi is fine >99% of the time, but there are low probability edge cases that occur and end up being very costly as you're scrambling to get reconnected. Connection stability is one of the main reasons (besides automated trading) why chart scalpers also benefit from trading over a VPS. If your connection ever drops at home, then your orders are still running on your server, and you can remotely connect using your phone or tablet mobile data in less than 3 seconds, while your home internet is restarting.
These are the bandwidth you needed for the first 3 hours trading the ES. Unfortunatelly I made the first screenshot just to late so you don't see the startup of NT8. Opening NT8 needed 200Kbs. From opening till a few minutes ago you never needed even 50Kbs download. Upload is even smaller. You see how the Kbs go lower after the big volume at the opening.