I currently trade at another well known firm (retail). I am interested in switching to Andover. I could use a bit of advice. aka is the software capable of be traded of a cable modem or do I need a T1. ETC
FWIW, I pay about $45/month for my 1.5 Mbps download speed cable modem from Charter in the LA area, and it's been pretty good about being able to get that speed when I want it, except around the 20:00 local time "prime surfing time". This is the same speed as a T1 leased line, except I only get 128 Kbps upload speed on cable (instead of 1.544 Mbps), but that's fine for most purposes. I don't know anything about Andover specifically. YMMV.
Speed isn't the limiting factor usually, but latency. There some types of trading that can only be done on P2P T1/T3. nitro
Nitro: Can you share some specifics of a connection (from where, to where, vendor, ping times)? Do they actually run over separate backbones, or are you just getting a fixed (and perhaps more direct) route across a particular vendor's network, avoiding other vendors in the process? I get times down in the 10-20ms range over cable modem and DSL to sites that are reasonably local (in the LA area), 30-40ms inside the state, and 60-100ms across the country. If it touches Alternet, it tacks on another 20ms or so :-(
as I'm sure I talked with you before, Citrix is now available for remote traders so bandwith shouldn't be too much of a concern.
Bandwidth is an extremely important thing. It is limited to remote traders on DSL/Cable modems. Milliseconds count. Office traders are on Andover's network using T-1 lines where bandwidth isn't an issue as much than. . Remote traders are either put on the VPN which is a virtual private network so that they can connect to Andover's network. Problem is this still doesn't solve the bandwidth problems of cable/DSL lines. So Andover is now putting majority of the remotes on Citrix. I used Citrix when I was at my other firm for First ALert. It basically has you running your software on a separate high end server and all the data you receive is just the pixels on what is running on that separate machine not the full amount of bandwidth as if all the data was coming through. This allows for bandwidth intensive programs to be run from anywhere. It's just about impossible to not tell the difference as it appears the programs are running on your machine. When press a hotkey buy it buys, same as if you move your mouse it moves the mouse on the screen. Citrix should probably be the norm for most daytrading firms in a few years I imagine.