That's right. I'll sleep extremely well tonight with today's -$13K draw. Seems my old reliable trading station decided to blow a gasket right in the middle of a major trade in the Europe session where I was a bit early on the 60-min retracement, and I spent most of today clawing back from an early abyss.
Bottom line is it could have been (and was) a helluva lot worse, but I had a very strong performance in the afternoon U.S. session once the 5 and 15-minute trends kicked into gear, with the majority of profits coming on shorting pullbacks heavily.
As they say, stuff happens. No biggie and I'm going shopping for a new PC tonight. (So no PalTalk session while I sort things out.)
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6 comments:
Don,
This isn't directly trading related, but if you can make due with your current trading station for a little while, I would highly recommend ordering a business class PC from Dell. You can add a reasonable 3 warranty that includes onsite, next business day repairs, as well as beefed up technical support (if you would make use of the support). Also, they will allow you to downgrade from Vista to XP, if that is something that you are interested in.
Regardless, IT issues are no fun and NEVER happen at a good time. Hope things are up and running smoothly for you very soon.
Thanks Tim.
I've had about a dozen Dells over the years, and just ordered their XPS630 with XP after realizing I can't buy an XP unit off the shelf these days (Trading Technologies requires XP).
Unfortunately, it will take a week so I'm piecing together an interim plan until it gets here.
Don
Don - I prefer HP rigs, but the Dell should work well too. I have an HP xw8600 that works very well.
A couple other things.
1) I'm not sure, but I suspect TT would run without problems in a virtual environment using VMWare. Their software is in the majority of large data centers to have automatic failover & they have a scaled down version that is $200 or so for manual failover. I'm using now to run my old PC after the power supply got toasted.
You can basically have a transportable copy of your main PC that you boot up in under a minute on any other computer. Well worth looking into.
Hows the Stoxx trading going so far?
Regards,
Eric
I use a local computer technician to build my computers to my specifications. The last one that he built for me was in 2004, and it is still working like a champ.
If I have problems, I don't have to talk to a customer service rep in India or Mexico; this techinician is one phone call and less than a 20 minute drive away. And, I don't have to deal with all those hidden programs on the computer that Dell, Gateway and HP love to install on their computers. Also, the software licenses belong to me, so I get software updates directly from the software companies, and not from Dell,Gateway or HP.
Charles
Hi Don-
Let me start by saying how much I appreciate the work you are doing with your blog. You are an inspiration to me as a trader, and provide hope that yes indeed a person can truly succeed at this business if he keeps at it and does the hard work that is required.
I just wanted to say that I too am running a Dell XPS 630 with XP, and am hugely satisfied with this choice of machines. One thing I would mention is that I outfitted my machine with RAID 1 drives, a crucial choice for mission critical computers. The mirror system keeps you up and running if your drive crashes. It's a small premium to pay and well worth the investment for the peace of mind and solidity provided.
The only thing a RAID 1 system doesn't protect you from is the outside chance of data corruption, which you can guard against with regular backups.
Good luck going forward... I'll be watching. :-)
Hi Thespaw -
Thanks for the kind comments and words of wisdom re: RAID. I'll consider it.
It find it interesting that my main "non-trading" PC -- which I use extensively and much more than the trading PC and which rarely ever gets turned off -- is a five year old Dell Optiplex that continues to run like a horse. That's actually the one I'll regret losing if it ever goes down.
Don
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