Hi, I just wanted to add here, that trading futures when market crashes arrive is something very different than at other times. You may have various problems with all brokers. Liquidity dries up in those environments, which can cause the market to move much, much bigger than normal. If you have level 2 data, and you look at the DOM, you can see the total liquidity day to day, and that can allow you to see if you are trading a very, very below average liquidity market. Markets like this, most likely, can have margin increases mid day. The market can be shut down mid day, which is not your brokers fault. Slippage on trade entries and exits will be extremely high. This is also not your brokers fault. These types of markets are a nightmare if you are trying to trade a trading system and have consistent size wins and losses. Most people out there are just thinking how they can make a bunch of money, when, from my opinion, they should more be thinking about consistency of running a trading plan over time.

P.S. Check tomorrow's newsletter out...

Mike

I'm guessing he means IBKR or IB, InteractiveBrokers

Sent using the futures.io mobile app

OK, well most traders would not entertain these suggestions. Most traders are sitting at their home offices, and thus a potentially huge amount of congesting Wide Area Network (WAN) traffic needs to flow from the market data source and exchange, to the trader's desk.

Firstly, traders are always "looking around" for the next instrument that might be more profitable, and often fail to specialize. Because they are considering, and are ready to trade, a range of instruments, that data has to travel to their desk.

Efficiency requires specialization, and that requires cutting down drastically on the number of market data feed elements needed to be watched/processed.

Most traders are looking for "high end" workstations to "crunch" all that data and manage many displays; and tend to neglect the WAN and ISP network facilities which are required to manage peak loading. How many times do you hear traders talk about "lag" ??? When "lag" is humanly perceivable; it's already huge.

If you are such a trader, and using NinjaTrader as your platform, you'll be running Windows, and you'll want to optimize your WAN networking as much as possible. This involves replacing the "stock" "congestion provider" (maybe it's CUBIC) for your Internet TCP with a much better one, currently named "CTCP" which handles WAN congestion more efficiently, thus improving overall throughput. (You can look up how to do that). Basically you want to tune your system as a Internet Gamer would want to do it, and there are guides for that.

But the key in our approach is to "Co-locate" the actual Dedicated Server and platform, NT8 NinjaTrader as physically close to the exchange as possible. This means for Futures traders, locating in Chicago or, at even higher cost, in Aurora itself so that your machine is very close to the data sources, and the orders portals if at all possible.

Choosing some degree of effective colocation means that the trading platform is very near, in network latencies, to the exchanges.

The role of your home office desktop thus becomes a "remote display" for all that is happening on your dedicated server. I say dedicated, because a cheaper virtual private server (aka VPS) is generally not good enough nor reliable enough.

A powerful data center server can be had for $150-$200 per month, on a self-managed basis. This could mean you'll need to learn how to be admin for your server, plus potentially creating 1 or 2 "virtual machines" in that same box; each of which could itself run an instance of NT8 NinjaTrader or your preferred platform; at no additional monthly cost. In my case, I get 3 "machines" for the price of one; since my monthly fee includes a license for 2 Hyper V VM instances as well.... very handy once you know how it works.

BUT LET'S FACE FACTS that very very few traders will choose this route, even if they understand potential advantages. They just don't have the specialist "mindset" to "take the plunge" into the world of very powerful datacenter based servers rather than the usual concept of "powerful desktop pc".

In my case, software on the server can take decisions when it "sees" a trigger opportunity; with a very short latency. That's gonna involve software features beyond the scope of this discussion; but obviously your latencies and the volumes of data you can process greatly increase when you choose to use a dedicated server.

Hope this helps; and Good Trading !
hyperscalper

Maybe a silly question but where can I find the newsletter? I seem to be unable to locate it.

Also when is it released so I can look out for it in the future?

Cheers