Any Online Day Traders?

[buster]

I am wondering if there are any online day traders on this forum that trade the US markets, and connect to trading servers in the US to trade.

Is latency a problem for the live data streams? Do you need an unshaped account - or could one get away with a standard shaped SAIX or the IS satellite account?

Please limit "pointless" replies. I am really only interested to hear from those in the know about these things and/or professional day traders.

Thanks in advance for comments ... Buster

 

[lukev]

My Dad is a day trader of sorts. He isn't a "professional" in the sense that he doesn't trade with other people's money, but he is on his machine the whole day while trading online. He uses Standard Bank's trading platform, and gathers news from a long list of websites. He doesn' have any trading software or any feed subscriptions.

In terms of international day trading he does a little of that with Global Trader, but AFAIK that's more like betting on the movement of a share rather than buying the share itself.

He uses ADSL 192, with a 2 gig cap, but he's usually buying extra bandwidth by the middle of the month, putting his usage at 4 gigs a month.

Hope that helps

 

[Franna]

For online trading the single most important factor is latency. The bandwidth is no real issue, as the data that is transfered is mostly text. I would suggest to get a 384K ADSL line with 4GB unshaped ISP account.

 

[buster]

Thanks for the input here guys, I think I have what I need to make my decision, and that is an unshaped account.