I'm a trader moving my office to my home. I know almost nothing about what goes on behind my computer screens as far as "tech" goes. I need to sit down with a professional, explain my needs, front end software usages, and then get help configuring the computer that I would order. When it arrives 2 weeks later, he or she can hook it all up at my house. Low latency is a must - most of the opportunities I go for are being looked at by others, and manual (mouse) entry is mandatory on these markets. Who in Chicago can do something like this? The existing tech guy at my trading office shrugs his shoulders on some issues. The "Geek Squad" (from Best Buy?) won't know trading. People think they know stuff, and then can't answer questions.
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=55297&highlight=ultimate+scalping Quick follow up. The person who does the work should be familiar with the kind of issues posted by "lakka" at the bottom of the ET post given above - and more.
Seriously, PM Nitro and ask him to be a paid consultant, and he's in Chicago. Worst-case is he'll say he's too busy and he'll reco another tech. I don't know about his trading, but I am certain he'll offer a solid setup. Far better to go with a trader/techie than someone who doesn't know futures from fx.
Wilburbear, If I can guide you and tell you what to do, I will do it for free. If you need me to do the whole thing and you don't lift a finger, I need to charge you. Doing this right won't take that long and maybe a combination of you doing most of the work with me guiding you and only getting my hands dirty when you get stuck is another possibility. PM me if you are interested and we can talk. nitro
I looked at the post by Lakka that you refer to. You don't need a special harddrive to trade. You can trade using a standard computer setup with 3 GHz processor and at least 512MB of RAM. SBCGlobal has great DSL service. It is very reliable in Chicago. If you are searching for tech help and Nitro's schedule doesn't allow it. I suggest you go to http://chicago.craigslist.org/cps/ and reply to some of the ads. A lot of those techs are students or just guys looking for extra income and do a good job. They will be a lot less costly than an official service and they will be more giving with their knowledge in most cases. Good luck.
Hi , No you do not need any special hard drive to trade and in the other post the Ultimate setup was discussed. Still to focus on disk IO is smart. So go with 10K ata disks for performance. Buy 2 for fault redundancy, setup in raid1 to mirror each other. If you want take it further add a controller with cache. The usage of diskio also depends on applications and number of symbols tracked. If one chart and scan a lot of symbols, things can get cluttered pretty fast if the application wants to write the data to disk constantly. The better disk and controller the less likelyhood of slowdowns. I have solved this issue using ramdrives, flushing data on to the disks in intervals. Also note that if one is using SCSI disks discussed in the other thread , those make much more noise compared to the ata disks. So best used if the PC is in another room. So if noise is a greater issue than performance, might want to take look at the low noise disk from samsung or seagate. Also make sure the rest of the fans inside is of a high quality low noise type.