why not run your algos or execute your trades in the cloud? Perfect internet connection, never goes down (okay, goes down once every 15.000 hours) Access from your laptop, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, multi monitor PC desktop or anything else with any operating system so longs as it has internet and remote desktop If you are running full algo, you can have hft institutional quality execution time by renting racks near the exchanges Rackspace Windows: $0.08/hr Amazon AWS Windows: $0.03/hr --- or $0.018/hr if you pay early These prices include free Windows, free upgrades, perfect security and free T3 internet or better - almost all Fortune 100's use them - part of Motorola's website might be on the same hard drive disk as yours I understand allot of traders have a huge pc desktop where they do their work, and enter their orders on a laptop, but why not the cloud?
Helped a buddy drop an FPGA-based algo appliance into a certain Manhattan colo recently. 10gig inout. Something like 300ns from fabric to decoded message. Can make a decision on a tick and get the message headed out before the next tick arrives. At least least 3 orders of magnitude faster than anything AWS could hope to achieve. Then again, it costs "a little" more than three cents an hour. Not sure you appreciate just how fast and tightly coupled the pros are these days.
There are clouds available on Manhattan and Chicago with wrap speed net blocks away from the exchanges... all available for less than a desktop (roughly) without leaving your office chair The security and reliability alone are imo great reasons for retailers to be putting in their intraday algos in (hft or not). won't have to dial up your broker and tell them to cancel all orders when your dog eats your ethernet
my main concern would be security. what's the risk of a hacker compromising the system, stealing your brokerage account info and doing some major damage...you also wouldn't want to put up any proprietary code on their systems so the code would also have to be protected too....
also, I found this with respect to Amazon: "3rd party software that relies on specific hardware attributes for their licensing to be in effect causes problems in a virtualized environment. While the instance is running the hardware will remain the same; machine ID, MAC address, etc are all static. Whenever you stop and start an instance then you will likely be put on different hardware. The remedy is for the software provider to consider changing their license model. " since I use Ninjatrader, this may cause a problem if I have to protect my code and send it over as a dll assembly since I believe the licensing functionality is tied to a single machine... anyone using Ninjatrader in a cloud environment with protected code? Edit: licensing info resides on Ninjatraders servers and not in the dll
Inviting myself into your home system is substantially less time consuming than tapping into the file structure of GE's website Edit: why doesn't everyone run it on the cloud -- clearly lots of laggards on this board, just be glad you aren't one of them