Every year or two, I reassess my technology and upgrade my equipment to make sure that I have what I need to be a successful trader. There are a lot of components to a machine, your Wi-fi, your Internet Connection, and more that have an impact on your chances of success.
This year, I made a major leap across the board and everything I have is now basically instant.
Let’s start with the Internet Connection. If it is available in your area, Cox or any cable modem Gigabit FIBER connections are the best. Sometimes, you can only get 1 GB, and that might even just be download, not upload, if it comes over Coax, but the reality is that 90% of what you do is download. You request something and then it drops the data/file on you and that’s the bigger piece. However, this year, I had Cox run the Fiber line to the house and now I have 2 Gigabit both ways:
Having said that, is that overkill? It can be. I have kids at home that stream constantly (and let’s face it, a wife that bing watches TV when she’s home), but yes, this could still be overkill. Having said that, if I loaded NinjaTrader with my Market Analyzer before when I had 1 Gigabit download and 80 MB upload, it took about 5 minutes during market hours to populate the Seeker/Comber signals in three columns. Now it takes 20 seconds. So that’s a win. That’s mostly about the Internet speed, and I have no hiccups at all in pulling data in real time.
To make that work, I upgraded my Wi-fi router to version 7. I got the TP-Link Deco mesh router with two points: https://www.tp-link.com/us/deco-mesh-wifi/product-family/deco-be85/
This allows any device in the house that has Wi-fi 7 built in to reach the 2 Gigabit both way speeds. Even if the device has 6E, you can get 800 MB both ways, which is plenty.
I have the main unit that is connected to the cable modem and then a second unit in the laundry room as part of a mesh network. My house is 5000 square feet, so one unit won’t cover the range. Now, I cover my house, my backyard, and some of my neighbor’s space (they don’t have my password). It’s unreal. I have tested it on my phone (Google Pixel 8 Pro) at the furthest reaches of my backyard, and I still get 800/800 up and down. It’s nuts. Now, keep in mind, you won’t get the 2 Gigabit speeds on devices that don’t have Wi-fi 7 functionality. For example, my son has an Xbox Series X, and he only gets about 18 Gbps download because that device is Wi-fi 5. The new version coming out this year has Wi-fi 6E. That will nearly 20x the download speed and still not be Wi-fi 7 levels.
Final step. The computer.
You don’t want data to bottleneck and you don’t want a machine that can’t crunch data. So, what I have is the following:
12th Gen Intel i7-12700k 3.60 Ghz chip (stay away from AMD, but you also don’t need an i9 unless you are gaming or doing graphics)
64 GB of DDR5 RAM. This is also overkill, but I don’t care because I used to have 32 GB of RAM and sometimes hit 95% usage and that would clog the machine. No longer an issue.
1 TB Solid State hard drive and a 2 TB regular hard drive (that I don’t need). You need to have Solid State to make things work.
Windows 11 Pro, obviously, for NinjaTrader and stuff. We aren’t at a point yet that good software for traders is available on non-Windows machines or web browsers. We can do that with MarketGear and TrendSpider, but not for NinjaTrader.
Some kind of decent sound card obviously, but this is the least important thing.
Video Card matters a lot. I have a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 that powers three 32″ curved 4k monitors flawlessly. Great card. There are better, but I’m not gaming on this thing.
I use Logitech mice and keyboards over their dedicated wireless network.
I have a Fingerprint-based USB login device for security and a Logitech Brio MX camera for voice and video for my Zoom/Google Meet calls.
I use a Logitech Deskmat for a cleaner experience.
The motherboard also matters a lot, and this MSI motherboard handles everything: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJSJ9TB3?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details
With it, you get Wi-Fi 7 built in or a wired 2.5 Gigabit port, which is what I use. In your walls, you need Cat 6 cables, not just Cat 5, to get the best throughput and get the results I showed.
With that setup, you end up with a 2 Gigabit Fiber connection both ways around the house and also to the machine start to finish back and forth with high speed DDR5 RAM and enough processing power to get nearly instant results.
In the modern world, this is the setup (or close to it) that people that want to be professional traders should strive to have. If you are a more casual (options) trader, then you don’t need as much. But I can tell you that I see a significant different and sometimes 10x load times versus the machine and Internet and Wi-fi that I had two years prior.