I'm in an outlying area of Calif. and my ISP baud rate is 21.4. I'm a swing trader so I do not have to stay glued to the screen. Do I need to increase my baud rate and which of the above methods whould be best? Thanks; JJ
While Satellite has a big pipe, you'll get your quotes 1/2-3/4 of a second behind the land-line world. Also, your orders will get there 1/2-3/4 seconds later. This is due to distance to geo-synch orbit, and compression processing time. Multilink is great if you can get an ISP that can do it.
So cable would be better/faster/more reliable than say a sattelite feed like DirectDuo which is put out for $69.95 by DirecTV?
No cable or any special lines, just an old phone line out here in the sticks. Whould that work '21.4 bauds' with real tick/ jj
Definitely, but reliability is dependent on your cable company. If they can keep the TV signal up, they should be able to keep the internet signal up.
Plainly, you're in internet hell. I'm in the same boat...no cable isp's, DSL, or ISDN available to me. The advice you've gotten so far is dead on...the dish will give you the delay but in as much as you're swing trading, that shouldn't be too much of a problem. I use a dish (Starband) for data (quotes, news, etc) and a 56k dialup line for order entry. It works but I would recommend it only if your trading isn't time critical. What is the situation with your ISP and the 21 kbs connection? Man, that is slow! and won't work with Realtick, although a 56 kbs line will. You might check out the large national ISP's like Earthlink or ATT, etc. Visit their web sites and see if they have a node that is a local call for you. Surprisingly, their coverage is pretty damn good. There is one other alternative that I've looked into. Verizon, ATT, or UUNET would run a dedicated line for me . Your local TELCO or UUNET should be able to do this for you as well. Be prepared to pay $500 a month or more for the line and the ISP. That will buy you a fractional T1 at a speed of 128k. Keep us posted! Best regards, Jim
I've tried other ISP's with the same result. Pac Bell say's it's the old lines put in about 30-40 years ago. If I go multilink will realtick work at 43 baud? jj
says that the minimum is a 56k line, if I recaall correctly. You may want to drop by their web site (realtick.com) and see for yourself. Given what your telco says about the phone line situation, the dish is looking better and better. There are a few upsides to the satellite...you'll have access to a gazillion TV channels plus you'll get download speeds of 500 kbs or more. Imo, you really have to factor in the type of trading you want to do.
I've heard several times that 28.8 is plenty for unlimited quotes, 100+. Quote data doesn't use much bandwidth, so you should be fine with 21.4 However, it's a REALLY good idea to have two service providers. Services do (will) go down from time to time, say every two weeks or so, unexpectedly, for 5min, 15min, 1hr. You can count on it. Say you have $10,000 in positions when it happens, what do you do? You wait and hope that it comes back up "soon" or you call your broker, get put on hold for 15 minutes, ask them what your current value is, and then you have to decide right then "do I liquidate" (possibly at a $500 loss), or do I hang up and wait some more. Remember, you are blind as long as your service is down. You have no idea what your stocks are worth. Having two service providers is imperative in my opinion. Last night in the wee hours my main one (cable) went down for 5 hours but was back up by market open. In the meantime I just switched on my other cheapo backup computer with 56k, no problem. I had open positions.
Depends on what kind of quotes you are getting. Last trade doesn't require much. One time I did a test using a L2 window. I started with no windows and checked the bandwidth usage. Then I opened a L2 window on INTC, then on MSFT, then CSCO. With each additional window, my bandwidth increased about 9K.