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)
We do have thunderstorms and floods over here, but the last power outage that I can remember was about 35 years ago. I have not invested in any such equipment.
This a fat tails problem. If we have a power outage here, nobody will be prepared, because half of the population has never encountered it.
It seems that you are quite used to power outages. Similar to India or Bangla Desh? Just asking because I am curious. Have not been to the US for ages.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
Not sure about you, but most of our electric lines are above ground here. And during hot summer months, thunderstorms can be quite bad, real windy, lots of lightning. So lightning can hit a transformer, or wind can damage a poll, and it causes a power outage. Vast majority of times power is back on within say 2-3 seconds as the power is re-routed, but too long for computers to stay up
I would guestimate in an average thunderstorm-year, power goes out for a couple of seconds maybe 5 times here.
If it is a couple of seconds that may happen here as well. For my audio equipment, TV and PCs I use a fused power point. Just to make sure that my equipment is not dammaged by high voltage.
A laptop with sufficient CPU and memory is no problem. The display is the issue, to me. My 3-year old notebook ( ThinkPad T61p) has a 15.4" 1920x1200 display, and that is the harder problem (or more expensive one at least). A notebook for trading really needs a very nice display.
For new notebooks, a quick look at NewEgg reveals that very few notebooks have 1920x1200 (or 1920x1080) displays, something I would consider a must. But that's just me. Plus the ones that do are generally 17" notebooks, that is too big for me to be lugging around.
Another possibility, of course, is to not use the notebook display at all. Some people want to own only a notebook and not a desktop at all. In this case, buy a nice notebook and then look into external displays for your home office/trading desk.
I think that a 1280 x 800 display is largely sufficient for a 15.4" screen. I just use the 1 year old notebook of my wife, a HP Pavillion dv5, with 4GB RAM, which I bought for € 495.00 and which is good enough for running NinjaTrader and doing everything I need to do.
So you would not need to spend USD 1200.00 but USD 600.00 should do.
I use three PC's. I have a desktop for surfing and email with a single monitor, then I have two Dell laptop's for only trading. No anti-virus or firewall. One laptop has a 17" M6400 screen and the other 15.4" M4400 screen. Both laptops have dual monitor cards and verizon wireless card in case of power outage I will still have the battery backup and internet. So I have four screens. I like the portability of a laptop. I can take it on vacation, a trip or where ever and still trade. I bought these as refurbs on Dell's outlet. Saved $100's!!!
I do have a question if anyone has any knowledge on Synergy. I would like to use one mouse and one keyboard for a three PC's, but not sure if it is save since I don't use anti-virus and firewall on my trading PC's? I know you have to download the software on all three PC's.
I attached a picture of my setup if anyone is interested. Sorry about the lighting. I have the lights dimmed low on the track lighting.
Instead of Synergy I recommend Input Director instead. Yes you do need to install it on all computers that share the mouse and keyboard. It works great. The download is free. The only problem I encountered is the antivirus software goes completely nuts when its first installed. The AV will settle down after a while.
