EL in the Cloud

I've moved to the Cloud. Well, to a data centre (center) in the New York area to be more precise.

The internet is getting more congested. I'm having to fight through the traffic like a London cabdriver trying to get into the City from Knightsbridge. What's more, the cloud has given me other advantages besides reducing the congestion problem. Not only has my ping time to my broker gone from 144ms to less than 2ms, but I have fantastic redundancy. The reduced latency should translate into extra dollars in terms of trading results by getting better exits. My entries seem fine, but the latency of exits were definitely costing me money. This is valid for both auto and discretionary trading. Everything is just that much faster.

For those who are not too technical, there is a site here, that allows you to check how long it takes for your orders to hit the city where your broker's servers are located. When you access the site, your location is pinpointed. You just need to move the rectangle on the small lower map into the area where your broker is and then hover over the cities until you find the right one. After clicking on it, the broker city is selected and when you run the app you first get a "ping" number. My ping rate from France is between 123 and 144, too high. When I ping from Flo's new Cloud location I get 2 or even 1.

Better yet, I am completely mobile and can access my usual workstation from anywhere. This is a big plus as I spend time between London, France and OZ.

Additionally, I feel much more confident in my auto trading with Flo living in the Cloud, as I am much less likely to lose connectivity in a data centre environment.

Choice of technology that creates the VPS (virtual private server) is critical. There are a number of solutions out there, but the one I wanted was using Microsoft's Hyper-V. The reason for this is that the resources I am allocated (CPU and RAM) are locked to ME. When my VPS was set up, my CPU and RAM were hard wired into it, which means that my VPS has part of the actual hardware that it is virtualised on, allocated only to me. Practically speaking, my 4Gb of RAM cannot be used by anyone else who is virtualised on the same server hardware. Typically, lots of VPS solutions being sold allow a server with, say, 32Gb of RAM to be allocated out in, say, eight 4Gb VPS. That means that if everyone needs to use their 4Gb, they cannot and are fighting each other for memory.

The only disadvantage of the VPS is the single monitor. I am used to using four 24 inch monitors, so I had to make a few changes to my desktop to accommodate this. I'm still working on the best solution.

Great trade today in the Dow Euro 50. See the vid.

I had a second Gap trade, but from the long side, in the ES. The vid, as usual, shows it all. My comment at the end was very prophetic. You can see the orange line on the bar chart at just under 1278.00.