Seems, that a minimum of two monitors is necessity rather than a luxury. I’m leaning towards 3-4 x 22″ for the desktop. A minimal 15′ laptop for travel and backup with external monitor connections.

As for the workstation/desktop, I put more emphasis on reliability rather than performance. That is having adequate contingencies for power failures, HDD crashes, component failures, virus & spyware protection, liquid spillage on keyboards, mice chewing your DSL cable, etc…I’ve gone through one too many to know that problems will likely happen when you need it to work the most….

I had a demo of Bloomberg terminals – the service not the computers, and came to same conclusion as John. There was nothing compelling to justify $2k per month, at least for the retail trader. Perhaps for the institutional trader….

If your budget is a bit more constrained, look for a good quality video gaming computer and check the specs carefully. (If you don’t know what you are doing, find a friend that does; because there are details that can sneak up and bite you.) Don’t waste your money on the $600 to $900 desktop systems from Best Buy, Staples, Office Depot, or etc. They are built cheap, and do not have the power you really need. Check their specifications and you will see.

A few months ago I purchased a gaming system with 6GB of 3 channel main memory, 2.67 GHz Intel Core 2 i7 620 processor (4 dual threaded processors; so it looks like 8 processors to Windows), 0.9GB of dedicated video memory, and a 1000GB 7200rpm hard drive, all for around $1500. My motherboard is an Asus P6T. I added a second 6GB of main memory for $100. That is enough power to loaf along with about 20% memory usage and under 10% processor use while driving dual 24″ monitors with about 25 real time charts open (2 of them are 133tick charts that use more compute power; many of the rest are 1 and 2 minute charts), plus email, calendar, web video, twitter, and everything else I have ever wanted to throw at the beast. The case has room for (literally) another dozen internal hard drives, and I can upgrade to RAID for increased disk speed and reliability just be adding a 2nd disk for $150 and changing the configuration. The current disk drive is definitely the performance bottleneck, when there is one. Processor intensive tasks happen instantaneously, even under (ugh) Vista 64bit. The system is very amenable to overclocking, if I should ever want to add 25 or 30% to the processing speed, or 10% to the memory speed.

If you envision EVER having more than 2 monitors (that means two video cards to drive 3 or 4 monitors), be sure to get an 850 or 900 Watt power supply (minimum), or you will end up throwing out your original power supply. For more than 4 monitors, plan on 3 video cards (max is 2 monitors per card, generally), and you will need a 1200 Watt power supply. Be sure your motherboard can support 2 or 3 video cards with high speed 16x slots, or at least 2 slots of 16x plus 1 slot of 4x.

Works well for me, and I think something like this is worth your consideration as a serious trading system at a bargain price.

I primarily trade stocks and perform stats intraday. I have a realtime feed of around 450-500 stocks which does take quite a lot of resources, so that is one of my primary concern.

best regards,
eToke.