How fast is your internet connection speed ?

If you are worried about internet speed, slippage and/or fees then you are not a good trader.

Its just that simple. THinking such trivial things matter will get you nowhere, fine tune your trading is better time spent.
 
Retail traders focusing on Speed or Technical analysis will most likely lose money. Information edge is easier than speed which is an arms race.
 
DaveV said:
Depends on how you are trading. If you enter orders manually, you could easily get by with 10 MBPS. My cable internet connection averages 160 MBPS. Last week it went out and I switched to using my phone as a hot spot for an hour. The phone speed was only 12 MBPS, yet my system worked fine, even though I run NxCore which downloads, in real-time, every bid/ask tick and trade from both the NYSE and NASDAQ.
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:thumbsup:
 
It depends on what sort of traders you are.

If you are position traders, the internet is not necessary.
You can use snail mail, pigeon, tortoise ... to send your order.


If you are swing traders, poor internet with lots of
disconnect will suffice.


If you are day traders, you'd better have a download speed
better than 500Mbps & ping < 3 ms.


If you are HFT, even the above is no good.
You cannot trade from home.
You need to have specialized computers,
specialized trading platforms, military-grade
internet connections.


_____________
 
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Snuskpelle said:
If you're going to watch like 10 to 100 streamed porn movies at the same time as trading, that upgrade makes kind of sense.
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I'll go out on the limb and say that most retail traders (trading from home) are multi-taskers in using their internet for downloading data instead of using it just for trading during the trading day.
  • Broker Trade Execution Platform
  • Charting service...independent from the broker
  • Real-time communication with family / friend
  • Live stream financial market news
  • Take a break during the trading day to watch porn, live stream protests / riots, social media feeds / gaming
I'm not being sarcastic via mentioning gaming as something retail traders do during the trading day.

Regardless, someone doing any of the above together on 100Mbps or less...they'll be lucky to not have speed problems, connection problems or whatever with their broker trade execution platform because its the internet...shit happens.

Best to have two computers or two laptops...put the broker trade execution platform on one connection and all that other stuff on the "guest network" connection.

Yet, if he can afford it...get a second internet provider at his home for that stuff while using the other internet provider exclusively (only) for his broker trade execution platform.

That second internet provider can also act as backup when the primary one goes down a few times per year or has disconnection problems a few times per year.

wrbtrader
 
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IB TWS network consumption on a heavy day would be 500 Kbps (Download), so a 2 Mbps stable internet connection would be more than enough for that purpose.

As everyone here stated, bandwidth is important, but latency (Ping) is even more important especially if you are day trading. For me it doesn't really matter that much since I am not day trading.
 
narafa said:
IB TWS network consumption on a heavy day would be 500 Kbps (Download), so a 2 Mbps stable internet connection would be more than enough for that purpose.

As everyone here stated, bandwidth is important, but latency (Ping) is even more important especially if you are day trading. For me it doesn't really matter that much since I am not day trading.
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Of course latency (Ping) is important.

Yet, if someone has a trading system that's dependent upon latency (Ping)...I know a few guys that actually changed brokers to a broker located in the same city of the exchange they're trading.

In addition, they then moved to the same city. Latency (Ping) is no longer an issue with them. :D

I know the above is a bit extreme but some people actually do what it takes to be profitable or to increase their chances of being profitable. The more I thought about that...I realized institutional trading firms also have offices / servers in the same cities of the exchanges they trade.

wrbtrader
 
As others have said, past about 5 Mbps, ping is more important. 600 MBps...sounds like Comcast or Spectrum? I suspect that a 30 Mbps fiber plan would give you lower ping (it did in my case). I also assume that you have a hard-wired connection directly into your router instead of using Wifi.
 
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