Gotmessner If you are just trading Eurex and/or SPI my suggestion would be to switch to the HK server. That should reduce your ping latency and number of hops by half. Good luck
nono -- Thanks for your disparaging remarks .. Mod -- could you please banish this guy for being disruptive? pekalu-- Your strategy is in place by large hedgies who appear to flood the market with stock after a Cramer or some other guru issues a pronouncement - it simply washes out the weaker hands.
Normally have a 128K ADSL but use dial up when travelling. Used to get away with 19.2K with the IB datafeed for RT but after moving to another datavendor 33K is required. Still good enough for backup though.
tom cole, if you find anything that attempts to put you straight disparging or disruptive, you'll be hard pressed to ever turn a profit in the market place. I did what I could to help you. nononsense
Mod-- This guy is increasingly trying, without any luck, to illicit a negative comment from me. He is very disruptive, insulting and should be banned from ET. nono-- IMHO, those who talk about profitability, like yourself, and comment negatively to others, tend to be either paper traders or have lost their money and simply cant stand to see others do well.
tomcole - I agree that nononsense can be a pain in the neck but in this thread he seemed to be offering a valid opinion, which, as he says, has been discussed a bunch. You seem to be overly sensitive. I'd go back and review both your and nononsense's comments and see who seems to be acting petulantly
Hi Whimsy, Why not agree with nononsense that tom cole can be a pain in the neck? About valid opinion: I think that over the years I offered many rather valid opinions, some indeed extraordinary useful. I admit that I also love to laugh at the truly nutty stuff - many do at ET. Whimsy, I'm not going to pompously insist that you be banned for this! Nono is against that kind of nonsense. In the case of this thread, I pointed out that the relationship between trading and ping/latency has come up many times in the past. Few bothered even to look at this information. Further, I strongly believe that the ONLY CRITERION TO JUDGE THE MERIT OF LATENCY IS PROFIT. I brought up this point and simply suggested that abstract reasoning about this aspect can only be kept up by individuals totally unfamiliar with the profit making side of trading. Please, correct me if I am wrong. Where did our tom cole show that he generates more profit with less latency? He did not. Hence, I assumed he must be unfamiliar with making a profit. You may find nononsense's logic rather down to earth, but it's the only way how to learn to trade profitably. Be good, nononsense
OK, let's let the personal stuff rest.... This thread has been informative. I'd like to see it keep going. I hope this isn't too subtle.
Sorry to be so late to the party, but I thought I'd offer my opinion.... I've worked in IT for a bunch of different prop firms, and in all sorts of areas of finance. I feel it totally depends on your trading style. The traders I most recently worked with were developing a black box system and we had the ping times down to less than 10ms for a round trip (although that's not including the exchange time). Once you add in the exchange time, (most exchanges like the CME allow up to a second to match the order) it really doesn't matter as much as you think it does. If you really, truly are scalping, or trying to hit some weird spreads or something, then yes, it'll matter a bit. If you're doing that and you're at home, however, you had better know that you are already at a massive disadvantage. I suspect, however, that most "scalpers" are a mix of scalping and trend trading but just call themselves scalpers. Plus, if you're trading futures, the que will negate any good ping times you can achieve, and if you're trading equities on NYSE ping times don't mean anything obviously, but they will help on the NASDAQ. If you're trading from home, and you really think it's a concern, get a T1 unless you're on some weird island. It should be about $500 a month in most major connected cities (although i'm pulling that number out of my wazooo). DO NOT upgrade your router or anything like that, it's a waste of money. You're likely to get a 1-2 ms improvement on that, when you could get 4 months of a T1 for the same price and see a much bigger improvement. Also, try different ISPs and try to find one that shares the same facility as their backbone provider, if you can. The ISP we use (we direct connect to everything but the smallest of markets for us) shares a facility with EVERY major provider. We simply cross-connect to their cages for connectivity. Hope that helps, -The New Guy