Are 20 Monitors Enough For One Trader? You Decide.
Posted on Tue 25th Sep, 2007 06:00:29 AM
Talk about a crazy setup. The picture below is of fund manager Adam Sender showing off his new office and trading station setup. Apparently he is an art collector as well, so I am convinced either he has a mad case of ADD or he just really likes looking at images. (The full story can be found at Bloomberg).
You can check out some other multi-monitor trading stations posted previously on the blog, here and here.
Do you see 20 monitors as well or am I missing a few?
I think there are 3 or 4 hiding under his desk!
Man, how many PC’s would you need to run all those monitors!
We set these types of PC’s up often and there are limits as to how crazy you can go. you can scale UP (bigger machine doing all) or you can scale OUT (more machines each doing less). Scaling out is far easier and in the long run seems more reliable. So you get any given pc with a “quad” card which allows 4 monitors. Take the number of monitors divided by 4 and you’ll get an idea how many pc’s are under the desk.
You CAN go with 8 monitor cards but then the pc is reduced to doing very little more than drawing monitor graphics.
Our typical trader gets 2 pc’s with 2 monitors on each, one runs bloomberg and the other exerything else. if one goes down, the other can take over. It works well for our shop.
I like that idea, and use to do the same, 2 computers with 2 monitors each. I think the ultimate setup for myself would be one computer running 4 with just financials all day long, then make trades off the other one running 2 monitors. That’s my “plan” one day atleast.
I think the only annoying part is the excess number of keyboards and mice if you had say 4 computers running.
Wonder what his electricity bill is?
The keyboards and mice are the biggest compalint had by the traders. one option is to use a KVM switch (which allows multi pcs to one keyboard and mouse). The upside of scaling out is that you won’t be completely down if one computer dies on you.
Seems a bit overboard, however, I can totally see the advantage of having each chart on each screen instead of minimizing them. I only have 2 20 inch wide screens by viewsonic, thinking of doubling that, however. Even one of these isn’t enough to maintain my watch lists.
Anybody know what his performance track record might be? With this graph and real-time information overload, returns better be sky-high.
haha, ya you would think he was a good trader. What if the guy is down on the year? It would be such a waste of monitors…
he looks like a twat,probabley is as well
Does he run different indicators and methodologies on each computer?
Or is it the same indicators for different stocks?
Just curious.
Lovin’ the “hand” cream. I bet stock trading isn’t the only thing buddy uses these monitors for.