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While the home setting for trading offers a great degree of personal freedom, there are some disadvantages as well. You must be able to handle the isolation factor of spending large amounts of time alone. This requires enjoying your own company and functioning well alone. It means as well handling all the thoughts and feelings which arise while watching the market. We will explore this issue more thoroughly. |
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You must make a number of decisions regarding hardware, software, and connections that are already taken care of in a trading room. It is wise to talk to others and see what their experiences have been in using the different online sites aimed toward the active trader. There are numerous trading sites offering software packages, some of them quite costly, depending on the number of trades you plan to make. |
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None of these decisions should be made without careful consideration, as expenses will mount up each time a decision ends up not working out. This is one area where feedback from others who are familiar with various alternatives can be of great help. This feedback ought to be both in personal discussions with traders and from trading site bulletin boards. |
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Especially for active traders, the type of Internet connection you have is important. It is here that those trading from home are usually at a disadvantage compared to those in trading rooms. As you get your trading feet wet, you begin to understand that the market is moving so fast that the person who has the fastest connection to execute trades is at a clear advantage. |
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This is not as significant an issue for the occasional trader who is a long-term investor, who can get by using a standard Internet connection through a local independent service provider. But even for the long-term investor, my strong bias (based on my personal experience) is that you settle for nothing less than a cable modem or DSL for your Internet connection. Anything less than this puts you at a disadvantage if speed of accessing your broker and execution of trades matters to you at all. But that's not the only reason I strongly suggest it. |
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Not only will you have your data come to you more uniformly and at the rate it should (meaning real real time), even more importantly, you will also find that using the Internet through a cable modem or digital subscriber line is 100 times faster than the typical telephone line modem connection. |
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In other words, it makes all the difference in the world as to the quality of your Internet experience, not just your online trading. Once |
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