Do you know the brand and type of the motherboard? Then it is easy to figure out how many disks can be connected to it.
Fully automated futures trading
- Thread starter globalarbtrader
- Start date
This. But than again, I am not the intended audience for any of your ideas, so feel free to ignore me
Hi Rob,
great stuff, very excited about the new strategies
For the books, "quantitative futures trading" sounds pretty-cool for my taste
Regarding the new computers - 1600 for 2 PCs with no extra effort of assembling them is I guess a good deal, but I'd still advocate for buying used server-grade hardware from a previous generation (from Aliexpress or ebay) and assembling it manually. Things like case, HDD\SSD, power-supply-unit and motherboard are better to buy locally from a reputable store, but Xeox CPU and RAM (at least the CPU!) is I think totally OK to buy used. I mean look at these:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/328...earchweb0_0,searchweb201602_,searchweb201603_
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/329...earchweb0_0,searchweb201602_,searchweb201603_
These are 14-core (28 threads) Xeon processors for 250$, which used to cost 4,000$+ !!! (you can put 2 of them in the same machine if you have a dual-socket motherboard). And a used CPU is not like a used car, there's no moving parts, so the thing will probably be working for another 20 years just fine (of course there's still a risk, like with any used thing, but for that price I think it's justified, I personally bought E5-1650V3 CPU on ebay for next to nothing years ago and still using it).
Fun fact: I think George Hotz is training all his self-driving models on used hardware that they bought, and he is saying it's way cheaper than doing it in the cloud and you get a lot more bang for your buck..
I appreciate that you're not a hardware guy, but you did build a garden house, and assembling a computer is by far simpler than that
But again, to save time, 1600$ for 2 PCs worry-free is probably ok too..
Oh yes, and this monitor is really good: "43UN700-B" 43” 4K IPS - good size and resolution, good colours, matte screen and relatively inexpensive..
I guess the difference between a garden house and a PC is that if something doesn't quite fit you just hit it harder
And if something isn't quite right you can usually live with it; it doesn't result in a screen full of BIOS errors...It's funny because I've sort of toyed with the self build thing for years. Whenever I recycle old PCs (like I said, quite a few recently) I take the hard disk out to physically wipe it, and it really all looks quite straightforward. One of the reasons I've gone for the slightly larger box this time is I think I could probably manage to eg swap out the hard disk, wheras inside those tiny NUC boxes it looks a lot more daunting.
So if I'm feeling brave enough, what I will do for the second machine is build it myself. I'll buy the same case, because I really want to have the look of having two identical boxes
GAT
Yes, I've been doing the NUC / mintbox route up until now as well. Not because I used a UPS, but because for a while I didn't want my wife to ask akward questions about why a computer needs to be on the whole time. Those little mintboxes can be secreted under desks and are so quiet you barely know they are there, even without SSD. The first old computer I bought to run my system on was a standard tower, not exactly discrete, and it had a very noisy fan. I installed it in the garage, under a workbench and behind a stack of left over wooden floor.
Now the computers are openly displayed, so I can buy slightly bigger boxes.
GAT
I saw some errors in the morning that my system emailed to me - it couldn't retrieve last closing prices for KWR, EUR and CHF currencies, but I just ignored them
(it shouldn't be a big deal if it used stale EOD exchange-rates anyway), is there a bigger outage today ?I can see that the PROD system rolled MXP at night and then bought one ZS contract in the morning, and PAPER system traded even more.. It seems to be working fine now, the gateways are all green..
I was lucky: my system only reviews and trades shortly before the end of a trading day. I received all prices of the futures instruments and the trades were executed as promptly as ever. I did have a few missing forex exchange rates, but I store backup values and used these to avoid instances such as this outage.
Usually I spend those days googling alternatives to IB. This reminds me of the bygone days when BT was a monopoly and phone lines would take three months to get fixed, because frankly the choice was between a phone line in three months or no phone at all.
Ah, now there is a story. Pull up a chair, maybe make yourself a nice cup of tea or coffee and get comfortable.
Way..... back in the late 1980's one of the pranks I used to play on my friends was creating a boot disk (we're talking 5.25 inch floppies here, young un's) that installed a simple piece of irritating malware (written in a BAT script, we're not talking serious coding abilities). I'd go round to their houses, get them to get me a 7 up or something cold, quickly boot up the computer let the disk do it's work and have the disk ejected before they came back. Cue hilarity when they try and turn on their PCs to play a classic game like Outrun or Elite.
(Incidentally, don't try this at home. Or only try it once per friend, since if you repeat the exercise you run quickly out of friends, or find that PC disk slots end up covered in hazard tape)
As any hacker knows, this is a 'trojan' in that it relies on the user letting the software be installed on their system, rather than a virus that sneaks in via the back door.
Then in 1992 I went to Cambridge University to study computer science, where there was famously the worlds first webcam, the Trojan room coffee pot. I dropped out after a year, but the name stuck with me. After dropping out I began messing around on BBSs (if you're too young to understand the TLA, google it): logging into other peoples via good old phone line modems, and hosting my own from a server at the office I worked at (without permission of course). Naturally my 'handle' - for the reasons above - was trojan. I also found it amusing that I knew (but none of my friends did) that a trojan was US slang at the time for a condom (come on I was 19 - give me a break).
(Incidentally, when I got caught by the IT manager he let me off with a very gentle slapped wrist, as well forgiving me for multiple incidences of me hacking into the office Lotus notes system. He was a very cool guy, used to be a roadie for 10cc, looked like a zombie - very pale skin, thin as a rake, smoked 500 a day; and then weirdly in his late 50's ended up marrying a tanned, healthy, and very fit yoga teacher).
Fast forward to 1999 when I first began getting interested in personal finance (and I was about to embark on a degree this time in Economics, that I would actually finish), there was a big boom in tech IPOs in the UK. I registered on the UK forums of the motley fool (fool.co.uk) to do some more research. And I needed a handle. I can't remember if 'trojan' was already taken, but I thought I should have something that sounded more 'financey'. So I opted for 'trojantrader'.
I graduated a few years later, worked for a couple of years in investment banking, and then started working for an economics think tank whilst doing my Masters in the evenings. Despite this schedule I obviously had too much time on my hands (I was still doing fewer hours than in IB, and the job was much less demanding), because I started posting under two usernames on fool.co.uk (the other one, if you're curious, was 'BrackShroes' which was inspired by a Japanese options trader who I used to talk to a lot. Not very politically correct, but come on I was 31 - give me a break). Soon enough I got caught by the mods, and banned.
(@Baron if you're reading this, rest assured I have learned my lesson and would never do anything like that again. And in a second, someone else will reply to this thread from the same IP address reassuring you that I am a straight up guy and can be trusted. Listen to them! They know what they are talking about.)
After a brief hiatus I decide to start reposting. Of course I needed another username. I wanted something that was similar enough to my old username that the right sort of people would realise it was me, but not so obvious the mods would ban me again the same day. I decided on 'globalarbtrader'. Now, at the time I wasn't trading professionally, although I was punting a few stocks in a very low key way with my extremely limited personal capital (about 10 grand if memory serves). I certainly wasn't trading globally. And I definitely wasn't doing any arbitrage. Although subsequently you could argue that 'globaltrader' is a nickname that now correctly describes me, I've never really done any arbitrage. A little RV fixed income trading I used to have in my book at AHL was as close as I got.
So I can't really tell you where globalarbtrader came from. It might have been that I saw myself ending up as a global arbitrage trader, and who knows maybe one day my dream will come true if I close my eyes very tightly and say 'I do believe in clearing houses. I *do* believe in clearing houses)...
When I retired and started posting on ET, well it's clearly too much effort to think of a new user name.
The end.
Now go to sleep children, or the fat guy in the red suit will just leave all your presents at next doors house. Again.
GAT
Ironic postscript: fool.co.uk eventually closed their forums, after the US updated their software and the UK site couldnt' afford to migrate. Sad, because those forums kept my interest in finance ticking over and are probably one of the reasons I'm sitting here now, alone and cold in my garden shed. The site is now a mixture of clickbait and paid for content of no doubt dubious value. Most of the original users can be found on lemonfool.co.uk, where I post once a year with a review of my portfolio performance focusing on the long only side, having not really wholeheartedly made the migration across. Instead I seem to have ended up on here, so you guys are stuck with me.