Hi nitro, By the same token one could say: "No one suggests that you need a 'low' latency connection to do 100+ rountrip trades a day!" It all depends on what is "low" and how you "do" your trades. I learned a long time ago that with simplistically rationalized beliefs, it's hard to make any money. Of course, if I had the choice, I would prefer to have a 10ms "latency" [however you define it] over 1000ms. Be good, nononsense
I don't know if this still falls into the discussion of "brain latency" and the minimum acceptable response time for humans. But it's still something that blew my mind... Today I had dinner with a bunch of friends in a very famous and massively crowded Vietnamese restaurant here in my suburb. The food extremely good, and extremely cheap, with lots of little items ranging anywhere from $2-$12. Came pay time, we went to the cashier and did a group pay. This Vietnamese girl added up the entire list, over 30 items, on a calculator, in what I am convinced was much less than 10s, then proudly pronounced in broken English: "That's $143.75 thank you!". One of my mates went "wow". I just stared at her. She was like: "Are you OK?" I'm like "Yeah. Did you just add all that up just then?" She: "Yes, $143.75 thank you!". Well, while we racked the cash together, she was tackling packing up fast food with one hand and doing some client's credit card voucher with the other. I'd never seen anything like it before. We all walked out, and some people on the street said: "Did you see that girl with the calculator?". We all just nodded in disbelief. I was too curious, convinced she was cheating, and insisted on keeping the bill for verification. At home, I added it all up diligently with a calculator (it took me a while), and to my amazement the figure was precize to the cent. I was gobsmacked. This experience not only made me think "What am I doing wrong? Am I lame?", no, it also made me realize that there must be some merit to the point of latency, if a girl can just about add up 3 price figures with her fingers in the time it takes me to submit an order with 350ms ping...
I don't know much about it, but women's brains are theorized to work more "parallel" than mens. Men think "serially." It is also believed that women are better than men at doing more than one task at a time, a different kind of parallelism. In our proprietary trading firm, there are many men trader, something like 43 of us. The other 7 or 10 are women. Many of the men traders have lots of experience, on the floor, screen, you name it. There is a twenty three year old girl that is the best trader at the firm. What is worse "evidence," is that some of the women have at one time or another been the best trader at the firm on any given month, but are satisfied with making a grand or two by 9:00 EST and go shopping - LOL In a recent "special issue" Scientific American about the brain, they talk about savants. What I found interesting is that most savants are men by a large factor over women. The "mysteries" abound... nitro
Ok, true. But then the poll is not measuring anything other than whether there are more "swing" traders than "arbitrageurs" responding to this thread - that is certainly self-evident simply because there are 100 "swing" traders to every 1 arbitrageur. In a way, the best general answer will come from those that are neither arbs or swing traders, as it is clear that to arbs it is critical and to swingers it is of no consequence - you gain no insite from asking them. The high volume daytrader on the other hand is in some way the one that best answers this question, since for him, speed is just another tool in his toolbox. The question is, how important is it for him. When I did that kind of trading, my vote would have been, it is very important, but not critical. The poll question should be: If speed is important to your trading, do low ping times matter? Otherwise, we might as well ask whether we would put a blind dog at the head of the pack or in the back. nitro
Please post a traceroute of this - I get double that Even from an OC192 backbone in Chicago, I get 42 ms and 8 hops. You must be on the same peer as IB, in Boston or on the East Coast somewhere, probably NY or Philly. nitro