Can anyone explain what do they mean by latency with satelite connections and how does it affect daytrading and scalping? The reason I'm asking is 1) I'm an ignorant dumb ass and I have quite a limited vocabulary. 2) I seriously want to get into day trading, 3) Here only ISDN, T1s, and satelite broadband are avilable(I curse the day I moved out here) Oh yeah my 56k dialup is at whooping 32k. 4) Of these only satelite broadband seems to be reasonably priced, (ISND~$200/month, 128K T1~$500/month, Satelite~$100/month) 3) Now that I think about it #1 would negate #2. Maybe I should rethink the whole thing.
I've never had an internet connection with satelite but I can relate this story to you. About two years ago I was trading from an office in Denver and called into one of our other branches in TX. When I was put on hold they were playing CNBC instead of a futures squawk like most firms have when you are on hold. The CNBC I was listening to over the phone line was not one, not two, but about 3 full seconds IN-FRONT OF the CNBC we had on TV infront of us there. The difference ofcourse was that we were on Sat, and the other office was on cable. I had put the thing on speaker and a couple of scalpers almost went ballistic because that was back in the day when the cnbc effect was quite real and we had guys bitching about our feed being slower since we had moved locations. (yeah we had cable at the previous place). I know your probably talking about SAT data not TV but trust me if you scalp Sat can be a problem on cloudy days. If your more of a postion/swing trader...probably won't matter. A lot of firms these days use Satelite data as a back up. Cheers.
Go with the ISDN for scalping, the satellite for position trading is all right; the lag time on a dish is about 1/2 a second due to it's nature ...
Latency basically means a lag or delay. You may be getting T1 speeds but it also may be a second or two behind. Therefore, making scalping very difficult. I would definitely ask the provider and run some tests before you start trading.