Question Building Stock trading PC - What are the prerequisites?

[Anandtech1999]

Me and a friend had a brief conversation as to whether there's anything special about stock trading computers.
Other than a fast connection and possibly the ability to display to multiple screens (the more the better).
What else do you need in a stock trading PC? Plenty of RAM? A very, very fast CPU? RAID-0 SSD, a finetuned Windows 10, a wired Ethernet line, wired keyboard and mouse
Curious to see what you guys think of it. There's some specialist builders like https://www.tradingcomputers.com/ but I am dubious about their claims

 

[RLGL]

Good question, I do not know if people in here frequent day trading. My opinion, pretty much anything recent for general internet and email usage.

 

[EliteRetard]

My friend is doing day trades now, through TDAmeritrade. He did sign up for live pricing, and has enough invested to remove trade restrictions.
He's no expert or millionaire, his best day was just over $500 profit but usually it's more like $100-300. He still has a "real" job too.

He's using an old 4790k ITX gaming system I built him, no OC, Win10 Home 64bit (same install since it was built), and he's using WiFi.

Basically it seems that if the extra few milliseconds are going to make/break you, maybe you aren't ready for this kind of trading.
Obviously there are companies that spend millions to get the lowest latency possible because it does make them a lot of money.
For the average Joe however, even on "big" trades, I don't think the value difference is all that much...but I could be wrong.

As the poster above suggested, just get something modern and that should be an easy 80% of the way.
I'm going to guess another 15% is down to internet latency, with PC optimizations only being 5%.

The new i5-10600k looks like a good choice, high base frequency and not terribly expensive.
High seed RAM is fairly affordable now, as are NVME SSDs.
Can still get GPUs with 6 display outs, here's one example:

https://www.amazon.com/VisionTek-Radeon-7750-GDDR5-MiniDP/dp/B00C7EPSVS/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=7750+eyefinity+2.0&qid=1588293633&sr=8-2

 

[ringtail]

As for seeking SPEED, evidence shows that you have at least 5 minutes or a little bit longer until market prices efficiently converge on new information. Therefore it's suggested that you not spend a lot to eek out the fastest performance. (It's also suggested you not day trade, since pretty soon the market will have your $ and you'll have 0).
link to abstract

 

[mindless1]

Nothing special, you just do the same as any other situation, load the app and see if it's taxing the current CPU or you're running out of memory so you need to improve that.

Of course there's # of monitors and video card(s) to support that, and hardwired ethernet instead of wifi unless your wifi is very strong. Wired mouse and keyboard, not so much unless the wireless you have are eating batteries and you often find you have to stop and change or recharge them. I can't recall the last time I swapped my cordless batteries so it's been many months.

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

None of the software or websites are particularly taxing. Any modern basic platfrom from Intel/AMD will do the job with a basic SSD for the O.S., copious amounts of fast RAM and any old CPU should handle it. Most of the cost really will be dropped into the displays and the GPU's running multiple displays and the internet connection (having something very good with good latency so a refresh of all software/websites doesn't sit and grind forever).

Very best,

 

[maniac5999]

I think you need to clarify what you are looking to do here. Are you looking to day-trade, run your own HFT shop, do fundamental analysis, or something else? I'll address each in order.

High Frequency Trading (HFT): You'd be going up against the big boys like Knight(now Virtu), Cantor, Citadel, and Jane st. trying to squeeze fractions of a penny out of stock transactions many times per second or to arb quotes across exchanges via software you write. What do you need there? More than you can afford: Top of the line server equipment, colocation with the exchange's datacenter etc. (because the speed of light just isn't fast enough) A fun fact is that the very first high-speed internet was built by HFT firms. When you're trying to arbitrage commodity prices between the NYMEX in NYC and CBOE in ChiTown it matters if your fiber-optic cable goes through Akron or circles around it.

Day Trading: Basically betting that a company like Coke will go up in the next six hours. Basically any old toaster and a DSL or better internet connection will do. I don't know what sort of software you'll be using, but it's likely to be a spreadsheet to track positions and P/L along with some basic technical analysis software. I've got separate opinions about an average person's ability to make money doing this, or the value of technical analysis overall, but I'm going to leave them out of this discussion.

Fundamental/Macro/Quant Analysis: Researching individual companies and forming valuation expectations for them, and buying and holding to see if you're right, OR studying macroeconomic signals and how they affect company/sector/factor performance, etc. OR studying how fundamental company characteristics affect return. I'd say that what I do mostly slots somewhere in here. My load-out includes Bloomberg, FactSet and Morningstar Direct and I will frequently be working with excels that are 10s of MB large.(always turn auto-refresh off for those btw.) My WFH setup is an i5 4670 quad at a bit under 4ghz and 32GB RAM. The RAM is really needed here, and I'd suggest some sort of SSD, although it's unlikely to be a limiting factor. The graphics card just needs to be fast enough to drive the monitors, honestly unless the mouse movement at 30hz bugs you it's fine for what you'll be doing. Also: a huge monolithic extreme HD monitor doesn't play nice with a lot of these programs, particularly Bloomberg. I learned this the hard way, since I never designed this as a workstation. A bunch of cheap ~24" 1080p monitors would be ideal. (at work most people have at least a 4=pack, with 6 being the normal load-out.

 

[DBissett]

Trading computers have been discussed a lot in the Tradestation forums, and you can research build to order trading computers at several websites to see how they build machines. Little known fact is that video cards may or may not matter much. Tradestation requires only the most basic 2D cards. I use two GT710s in mine, and can run up to four monitors easily. TS is not multi-threaded but can use all the speed you can get from a single core. So shoot high there. Think or Swim software, now owned by TDAmeritrade, does run the video card hard, so you'd need to spend more there if you plan on running that software. How much card you should buy I don't know. Best bet is to call TDAmeritrade support and ask them. Or hunt down relevant forums. As for RAM, I run 8gigs and do fine. 16 wouldn't hurt. 500gig SSD. No OC, standard cooling on an i5 about 6-7 years old. No problems. As for monitors, recently bot a Samsung 42" TV for use as monitor after reading on the TS forums. Awesome real estate and MUCH cheaper than equivalent PC monitors.