Leland,
I traded from a private office until last year. Nice office. I had an accountant, a secretary, a couple of research people. Great setup. I managed a small ($2.3M) private hedge fund. I "blew up" during the market crash last October 8. Miscalculated the bottom by a few percentage points and the leverage killed me (good lesson on margin). Lost about 90-95%. Anyway, due to my small remaining balance I was forced to quit leasing the nice office suite and moved to an office I built at my house. Lost the overhead too so I started working alone. (Keep it small and keep it all.) Because I now only had a small balance I was forced to look at short term swing and day trading.
I actually prefer trading from home, however, I'm extremely independent and highly self motivated. I get up about 4:45AM every day and have my quiet time and go running. I eat breakfast and am in front of my computers and CNBC by 7AM. I use two separate computers on a six computer network (the kid's and my wife's computer are on the same network although in the school room) to do my trading. For internet connection I use three separate 56K external modems controlled by a network device called a webramp. I have two Earthlink accounts and one AT&T account (ISP's) so I am running the equivalent of 168K connection with mucho throughput. True connection speed is more like 150-155K plus the benefit of redundancy. I highly recommend this setup. I have two separate quote services (both with level 2). One is Interquote and one is Realtick 3 through AB Watley. I use direct access (obviously) and having redundancy is once again a real benefit when things always go wrong when you have a big position in a critical place in a fast market! <ggg> The quotes are provided through two separate vendors (PC Quote and S&P Comstock) which keeps them both honest. If one lags, I let them know immediately and often they give me credit for data fees if they are consistently have a problem. Believe it or not, AB Watley is the one that has more problems (and they use RT3). Having multiple computers helps as well. I can keep one dedicated for trading, while I have Quicken, Netscape (SI), email, etc. open on the other machine. I can be looking for stocks (screens), news, research, etc. while watching a position. My office is where I spend much of my life so it is NICE. I don't allow interruptions (unless it is really important). It is as though I went to my private office down town. It truly is THE ultimate trading environment. I have no idea how anyone can make a living in the SOES shops I have seen on CNBC and on news shows. I would probably go insane and start shooting people as well <ggg>! I've never been much of a crowd follower anyway, so the hyped up environment would flash me back to basic training in the Army. No thanks. I would say, for anyone who has plenty of self discipline, there is no substitute for trading from a home office.
Matt |
