If you're frugal, looking to save a few bux. Search ebay for HP elitebook i7 or Dell latitude i7 with all the goodies you like for about 200 bux. They're a few generations old, but for trading they're great.
Which technical specs are important depends on how you intend to use the machine. If you use software with a "heavy" user interface (IB's TWS springs to mind) you may want to focus on the graphics performance of the laptop. If you don't use a graphical interface but let your laptop do a lot of number-crunching you will need a powerful CPU. And if you store (read/write) a lot of data then a SSD is useful to have. So the real question is: how are you going to use the laptop? What software will you run? And, besides trading, what else are you going to do with it?
For TWS, there's no different I can detect either with a GTX 960 or an integrated Intel chipset. Besides, most modern integrated chipsets are plenty powerful for Windows and charts, even if accelerated. Charts are 2-dimensional and an overkill for a GPU to render. Your usage is still 90% CPU based.
Btw, this is not true in 2018. Most heavy calculations on the more advanced level have been moved to the GPU as it's much more efficient, so if you're doing very heavy backtesting and know what you're doing, you need a top of the line GPU, CPU is not that important. Of course most basic retail packages still rely on the CPU.
I didn't say you NEED a top of the line graphics card to display charts, just that they most likely use accelerated graphics.
Best place to start is to check the minimum requirements of your trade execution platform and the same for your data vendor. Most brokers and data vendor list the minimum requirements at their website. If yours do not...give the tech department a phone call to find out the minimum requirements. Simply, make sure you get a laptop that can do the minimum requirements to continue using the software you're currently using. Also, if you have special needs...make sure your laptop is suitable to get those other things done. In addition, what do you mean by "away from my tradestation" ??? Do you mean in another location in your home, backyard/patio or do you mean traveling/trading from another state/country. Make sure you get the necessary accessories for your laptop to be able to do such...as in to be able to trade. Last of all, if you're planning on traveling/trading...you may want to look into temporarily changing your cell phone plan for the month of traveling/trading so that you can use your own "personal hotspot" off the back of your cell phone carrier instead of using a public wifi spot...test this setup for trading purposes prior to traveling. Much better security & privacy. wrbtrader
+1 That's my actual setup, although my system is fully automated. You can't get any lighter and easier to carry than a Surface Pro.
With IB's TWS and a massive spreadsheet set-up, my different computers (8-core, 4-core, 2-core) are nearly untapped and running comfortably cool. RAM (16g, 8g, and 4?g), similarly happy. GPU/CPU balance has not been an issue. What has *really* set these guys alight is as soon as I bring in any general form of internet/media connection. A visit with Yahoo!Finance, YouTube, free/livestream CNBC, GMail, maybe a touch of eBay? Back and forth with seeking-Alpha and CNBC blurbs? And all of the leftovers (Java? JSON? html?) start to add up, to used and/or idle threads holding RAM and CPU capacity hostage. At this point, the 8-core CPU has it hands down -- nary a wrinkle, no matter what I throw at it. The 4-core backup, once a day at least, requires me to clear out of everything except TWS (and sometimes, TWS!), to get back to a minimum resource-consumption profile. The 2-core (a laptop) might be even twice a day, but I really don't use it for full-on business-day activity that much. I have concluded that the worst load is sloppy internet sites/consumption as the main culprit, and CPU cores (and roughly matching RAM) that's the solution. And a fine SSD would not hurt, though.
This is why you use an ad blocking tool. Not just to reduce spam on your screen but to save resources. It also depends on the sites you frequents, some are just horribly coded. The things that are most likely taking CPU time are Javascript bits.
I just can't imagine what it would be like without one. I think we'd all need 'gaming' computers -- that's what my big one is/was, and it's now... "mid-fi" or something. The laptop, FWIW, is a Toshiba, and is flimsy total JUNK. Prior was a DELL that I had for many years/upgrades -- solid, easy to work on, reliable as all get-out. Were I to shop today? Lenovo (for whatever IBM durability remains in the name) and DELL would top my list.