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Re: building trading machine from scratch...



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oh yeah man, in the olden days man, when i was trading spoos and bonds 
off tick charts man...twas time... now i am on monthly charts mostly... 
call it graduation or just getting old... or maybe wise?
 it took a while to get from tick charts to monthly... i tell you. 
as far as the computer building, you know how it goes when you are young 
and on a budget with 5 thousand dollar account trying to make a fortune in futures,
you gotta cut corners and save some doe for the rent and the babes at the joint...
twas time... i bet you many of us went through the tick chart / 5K account / spoo / 
clone / satellite / stochastic system / basement trading office 
and some graduated to low res once or twice a year trading :-) 
if you made it all the way from tick to montly, man... you are there...
bilo.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Jerry War 
To: 'Bilo Selhi' ; 'Omega List' 
Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2002 2:57 PM
Subject: RE: building trading machine from scratch...


Why do I have the impression you have done this before?  :-)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bilo Selhi [mailto:biloselhi@xxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2002 2:55 PM
> To: Omega List
> Subject: building trading machine from scratch...
> 
> 
> ok per requests, here are a few pointers on building a 
> trading machine from scratch.
> - get a case with at least 300W power supply, i recommend at 
> least one extra intake fan. make sure the case/motherboard is 
> enabled for sleep or hibernate modes, in which case you can save 
> energy and your hard drives from spinning all the time...
> also make sure you keyboard allows one touch power, sleep, wake up
> interface with mobo and powersupply, have to check three things for 
> that: power supply, mobo and keyboard all three must be enabled
> for various power saving modes.
> - preferably get a well known Intel chipset board, you can of course
> go with AMD board but make sure you get a stable chipset.
> you can find out about all mobo problems on www.motherboards.org
> website. motherboard IS the key component!!!  
> - processor speed IS NOT that important for trading, most of you trade
> 1-5 markets intraday and 1Ghz machine is plenty... don't waste 10K on 
> a super machine that will go obsolete in one year... unless of course 
> you are trading most world markets on 1 min charts with 
> autoexecution :)
> - memory, get at least 256M but better 512M is plenty to run 
> tradestation,
> when the market load goes up on some news event 512 should be plenty
> to handle those fast market ticks... memory size is more 
> important than
> processor speed, a known fact.
> - get two equal size hard drives, use one a back up with 
> duocor, THE ONLY 
> way to go when trading... with duocor you can be back up and running 
> in under 1-3 minutes if you main drive fails. use removable 
> trays for both 
> master drive and slave drives, so you can swap the drives 
> without opening 
> the case ( if bios boot hd selection option is not avail ) 
> make sure the case has enough 
> 5' bays to accommodate your 2 hds + CD + whatever. don't use 
> crapware back up 
> such as ghost, drive image, etc .... it is CRAP... amateur ware...
> - many of you on the list go to extremes when selecting video 
> cards... big mistake
> unless you are a gamer you don't need fancy video for 
> trading... you need a basic
> dual 2D AGP card or a couple of single cards will do the 
> same, unless you a running 
> something like 100 charts at on one frigging giant screen...
> - get at least 17' flat screens, else you face will burn from 
> heat and radiation,
> monitors - that's where you want to invest your money, not 
> the machine...
> - basic on board sound is all you need, not a friggin 3D 5 
> channel surround sound 
> TS new order beep... if you are a high resolution trader ( 
> 1min -5 min ) and need to 
> use the crapper ( that maybe outside if you are backwoods 
> trailer trader ) and want to hear the 
> alerts at same time then get a speaker / cordless 
> phone combination, place base phone near computer speaker, 
> page the condless
> part, you can now hear the speaker alert sound through the 
> cordless phone which 
> you should take with you to the crapper. alternatively use 
> baby monitor...
> ( i have one extra for sale if someone wants it :-) ), else 
> you have to pump the volume 
> up so that you could hear the alert from the crapper which 
> might be detremental to 
> the process itself or scare the s...t out of you while you 
> are doing it, your wife or you dog,
> comes from personal experience... don't repeat others mistakes...
> yet another alternative is wiring a crapper with a speaker or 
> taking it at the desk... joking of course.
> ( by the way using a baby monitor/ cordless phone comes handy 
> when finding a sattelite 
> on a dish by a beep, you figure the rest )
> - if you want to get a CD burner, make sure there are no 
> known issues with 
> motherboards and OS... check BEFORE you buy... same goes for DVD. 
> if you plan to use DVD drive to watch movies after market 
> then pay attention 
> to your video card selection,
> basic might not do there, but still you only need 2D card but 
> with extra memory,
> make sure it's compatible with the DVD drive. no need to get 
> super 3D ultrafast 
> $300 video cards for chart trading...total waste of resources.
> - don't try to come up with a machine for trading and playing 
> games at same time...
> gamer machines must have different configurations, more power, etc...
> - use w2k OS, this is the professionals OS, Xp is not 
> needed... but is ok.
> what is important is you 
> make sure you understand windows restore and basic 
> troubleshooting concepts such as:
> recovery consol and its commands, erd back up disk, how to 
> handle lock ups and freezes,
> hd repair and maintenance and what to do if you get a virus ( 
> if you run an antivirus pack 
> and duocor with ERD then you should never get hit  ), w2k 
> boot options, 
> get a manual for w2k, install recover consol boot option, 
> always use ERD disk, get duocor
> and on-track virus and system  pack and use it wisely...
> - last and not least, every time TS upgrade comes out do a 
> full back up, then install then 
> check for a couple of days then back up again... the same 
> with other software or hardware
> additions/changes.
> - after you build you machine, burn it for at least 24 hours in dos. 
> - don't install ANY third party crapware/shareware/freeware 
> from download.com...
> only the ones that widely used...such as winzip, hypersnap, 
> acrobat, a lot of the 
> ware from there is spyware or trojanware, especially gnutela 
> type ware... stay away 
> unless you want somebody to have access to your machine while 
> you are away...
> or use dedicated machine for the non critical tasks...
> - get at least a 500W UPS back up, but make sure you 
> understand that most
> backup will not protect from power spikes ( there 3 types of 
> power problems:
> spikes due to lightning - EMP, burnouts - short duration 
> power loss and blackouts ) 
> that will reset you machine even if  it's on UPS when EMP 
> spike comes ( Florida and 
> other lighting prone states ), but will usually take care of 
> burnouts and short blackouts,
> else gotta ground both the machine and ups...
> - if you are privacy or big brother freak( we all should be 
> now since 911 ) then must get something 
> like secure tunneling pack for e-mail and browsing... check 
> with www.freedom.net or anonymiser 
> although no mention of secure tunneling on freedom anymore.
> also get a Nat hardware firewall. 
> anybody knows if pop. secure tunneling packages have back 
> doors to kar-ni-vo-r please let me know?
> 
> 
> i e-mailed the dos burn utility to traders2traders, get it there.
> bilo.
> ps. how to build a test machine:
> - if you are a beginner developer than you can need a test 
> machine to test you software 
> and OS. well there is a very simple way of building a test 
> machine from you main machine.
> get a extra hard drive, put it in a removable tray, install 
> whatever OS you want to test on it
> and simply replace you test hard drive with working hard 
> drive - you just got yourself a 
> test machine without buying it... you can then screw with the 
> test hard drive all you want, 
> drop it, burn it, infest it with whatever bugs,spyware and 
> viruses you want, reformat it, etc... test what 
> you want on it, without buying a separate machine just for 
> that... plus the rest of the hardware
> stays the same so you can test basically on the same hardware 
> configuration...very convenient.
>