Day Trading Computers
Day trading web sites and live trading rooms often have advertisements or discussions about day trading computers (computers specifically designed for day trading), and when they do, they always mention things like multiple CPUs, multiple hard drives, and especially multiple monitors, as a necessity for a computer that is going to be used for day trading.
This is simply not true. A day trading computer does not need to be any different from any other computer.
One of the most common reasons that are given in support of customized day trading computers, is that they need to have multiple monitors to display all of the markets that you will be trading, but as an individual day trader (and certainly as a beginning day trader), you are only going to trade a couple of markets at a time, so a 15 " (38.1 cm) laptop screen is plenty of screen space.
There are also some advantages to using a standard computer over a customized day trading computer. For example, by using a laptop computer for your day trading computer, you will be able to trade from anywhere that has decent Internet access, including hotels, coffee shops, a park, or the beach, which would be impossible to do with a desktop computer with three monitors.
Minimum and Recommended Specifications
The minimum specifications for a day trading computer are available in the Day Trading Tools article, and the following are my recommended specifications :
- Computer Type : Laptop
- Operating System : Windows XP SP2
- Screen Size : 15.4 " (39.12 cm) Wide Screen
- Screen Resolution : 1280 x 800
- CPU : Intel Celeron M @ 1.6 GHZ or Pentium Dual Core @ 1.4 GHZ (or AMD equivalent)
- RAM (Memory) : 1024 MB (1.0 GB)
- Hard Drive : 100 GB
- Networking : 10 / 100 Mbps Ethernet and 802.11b (11 Mbps) Wifi (Wireless)
- Mobile Phone Internet Access : Infrared or Bluetooth
By using a standard computer that meets the above specifications for your day trading computer, not only will you have a perfectly capable trading computer, but you will be able to use the money that you have saved (which can be quite substantial) to trade an additional contract.
Photo © David Silverman / Getty Images
Comments
Your recent comment promoting Sierra Charts was puzzeling to me. It can’t do watchlists, is clumsy, hard to use, and difficult to master. Whereas TC2000 is user friendly and much more intuitive.
I agree with this article 100%. I think the idea of a super-charged day trading computer is a little silly. First of all, you don’t need two 500 GB drives unless you’re doing video-intensive multimedia objects. Even if you save your charts now and then, they’e just relatively small JPEGS. Another scam is that most trading software will only use 2 CPUs so the need for 4 CPUs is injustified.
All you need to day-trade at the beginner to intermediate level is a laptop w/ XP Pro and an additional monitor and of course a video-card that allows it. On your laptop monitor you can have your market breadth and news feed and on the stand-alone monitor you can easily monitor around 4 financial instruments.
Everything else is BS that only the most hard-core multi-media people need. What day trader needs a TB of disk space??
One reason to have 2 hard drives is if one fails you can run on the other if it’s set up as a RAID mirrored drive.
As for having a TB size HD. well some traders download the day’s market data (which includes all the trades made in the market) at the end of each day for analysis. (which can be 500 megs – 1 gig of info.)