I'm not real knowledgeable about computers. I see all these fancy & expensive trading systems people use, and I wonder what do they give you that a basic home computer doesn't? Am I missing out on something by using what I currently have? I have Verizon DSL (just basic service like joe public has). Speed is: 1.81 Mbps download, 0.51 Mbps upload Windows XP 2 GB Memory Intel Core 2 6300 @ 1.86 GHz 400 GB Hard Drive Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT I use NinjaTrader & the internet; I don't notice any lag or poor performance. I was just wondering what a more expensive, faster computer or faster internet speed would do for me.
IMO: Nothing. Buy/use only what you need. If you only care to drive 10 mph, there seems no reason to buy a Ferrari for it.
You're not missing out on anything. Those fancy computer setups are done by people with lots of vanity. If you can't make millions with ONE 14" laptop screen, you ain't a real trader!
His name may have the word Mac in it, but it looks like a PC to me with Windows XP lol. I would agree with the others in general - if you don't see anything you are missing with your PC, then a new high end PC probably won't buy you much anyway. On the other hand, if you make a killing in the market one day, it doesn't cost much to go buy a nice one for backup and for learning more about PCs as well. JJacksET4
You are not missing anything. Some will get a 6 monitor set up with a $3K system to impress the friends. Some will overcompensate on the rig since deep down they know how inadequate their trading is. Kind of like poor people driving luxury brand cars that have 180.000 miles on it, wearing ton of bling bling and having 20 pairs of sneakers and outfits that go with them. Same shit! Don't be fooled. All you need is a decent pentium 4 and 1 monitor, if you know what you are doing. The rest is noise.
I bought a 3Ghz pentium 4 about four years ago. Just upgraded my PC to a dual core 3GHz processor. The new PC has 1000Mhz memory, the old one had 500mhz memory. The Hardisk is also 50% faster. The new PC cost half the price of the old one but runs twice as fast, due the faster memory and hard disk. (The dual cores also help but not with my trading as it is only single threaded). My backtesting engine finishes in half the time, instead of taking 25 seconds to do a full historic backtest it now takes about 12. Very noticeable speed increase.
I am shocked that no one has bothered to mention trading style. Super fast computers and blazing internet speed is only needed for high speed day trading. That is trading in and out in just a few seconds to a minute most likely using tick charts or using some sort of high speed automated algorithm. For any other trade style, pretty much any standard PC and broadband connection is fine. The exception to this, as someone else mentioned, would be if you need to have a ton of charts open at the same time or do lots of back testing of strategies. In that case a beefier PC and faster connection would help but still not really required.
Up/Download capacity has nothing to do with transmission speed but how large an amount of data can be transmitted within a relatively fixed speed latency is latency regardless of size my comments are similar to Businessman's, a noticeable difference in speed, and ease of use. the hard drive has 8 times more space than I need and I would now buy a Solid State Drive in preference to the usual, even tho SSDs are more expensive - I don't Need the speed - but no noise a new computer's a bit like changing from a manual drive to an automatic, just that much smoother my computer and monitor + os including taxes BC, Canada cost $1,566.36 in 2000 last year I bought a computer only incl txs for $430.08