Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Throughput is not important really. Any DSL or Cable Modem package would have sufficient bandwidth for trading. Latency is more important, but generally speaking DSL and Cable Modem have similar latencies. If you have FiOS in your area, that would be the best choice for latency.
A leased line isn't going to really get you much over DSL or Cable Modem, except a bigger bill. Your money would be better spent putting a server at a datacenter near the exchange if you have an automated strategy that benefits from lower latency.
I previously had a T1 line, but it was because I did not have anything else where I live. Once we got DSL in our area, the T1 was retired due to cost.
A T1 line will give you 1.5Mbps at a very low latency. The bandwidth is sufficient for trading, but not great otherwise. The latency tends to be much better than a normal DSL/Cable line, but milage may vary. The big benefit of a T1 is uptime. The line is always on, and may even have a an uptime guarantee. Your line will be monitored and if it ever goes down, they are on it fast. For me, this was huge, but now DSL is more than reliable enough for me. The big down side to a T1 is the cost, but costs have really come down over the last two years. If they came in a little more, I would consider having one as a solid backup, or run my trading thru the T1 and the rest of my network thru a DSL. Last item, is that there is usually a contract length that you need to commit to, which when combined with the cost, can be a big pill to swallow.
Lots of options, need to really do your homework if you go this route.
You usually get a business-grade SLA with T1 (E1 in Europe) circuits, and the underlying technology (PDH) is, IMHO, better than IP. Bit for Bit is as often usually cheaper than high-grade IP MPLS circuits.
EDIT: Next step up is a DS3. Some of the big guys who subscribe to the NANEX feed use that and I think their compression is optimized for that bandwidth (45Mbps).
But a T1 is going to run $300 a month, whereas cable modem/dsl is $50 tops. You could get both DSL+Cable Modem and a redundant load balancing router, for redundancy sake, and still save huge each month. The extra money is better spent on a dedicated server if your goal is to receive better latency.
Not to mention DSL and Cable Modem have 10x, or more, the bandwidth of a T1 for all your non-trading activities.
For my needs, I agree. But a friend who does it for a living has a E1 to his co-lo as he has had issues with the public internet that he doesn't get with a leased line. My day job actually involves these types of circuits (PDH/SDH/SONET) but at much higher bandwidth and it is a truly superior solution in terms of latency and availability if your app requires it. There are not a lot of apps that do.
If you really want speed, get a fast line to your broker. IB offers ways where you can connect to their trunk for a fee and that will mitigate some of the public internet latency.
Frankly, any discretionary trader will do fine with a regular line unless of course you are Neo.
Thanks guys for your help! Seems that leased line or even fibre optics does not offer much more benefit than the normal cable for discretionary scalping in terms of speed. Will stick to normal DSL or cable for now
