My updated trading desk setup

My updat­ed trad­ing desk setup

One of the best things about trad­ing is that I get to use cool tech to aid in my work. I sim­ply love tech. All kinds. Hence, the T3ch Addict. As a self-pro­claimed tech addict I have acquired a bunch of it over the years. Not know­ing (or did I) one day it would actu­al­ly serve a good pur­pose, day trad­ing. Also, since this is MY blog I get to brag about my setup

Check out my pre­vi­ous set­up here

Cur­rent Hardware

A quick sum up of my hardware

• Asus Z170‑A motherboard
• i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz
• 16 GB of 2472MHz of DRAM
• 2 x EVGA GTX 1070
• Mon­i­tors
  • Acer X34, 3440x1440, 34 inch,100Hz refresh rate, ultra­w­ide monitor
  • LG 24MP67HQ, 1920x1080, 24 inch, 60Hz refresh rate, nor­mal aspect ratio 

SLI

I still use the same hard­ware but have added one more GTX 1070 so that I have a SLI con­fig­u­ra­tion. SLI sim­ply means two Nvidia graph­ics card that work togeth­er to give you a boost in GPU pow­er. Would I rec­om­mend any­one to go SLI. Not real­ly? Just buy the card most expen­sive card you can afford. Although there might be some use-cas­es for SLI so I sug­gest you Google the sub­ject a bit.

Back to my set­up. I recent­ly added an arm mount that enables me to put my screens above one and oth­er. Before I would have the ultra­w­ide mon­i­tor in the mid­dle and the 24 inch mon­i­tor on the side in por­trait mode so that I would have more real estate when typ­ing the long trad­ing jour­nals I write. How­ev­er, this would mean I would have to look to my left the whole time while writ­ing. I decid­ed to go for a set­up where I could have both mon­i­tors in front of me and this is what I came up with.

I have a third mon­i­tor lay­ing around and at first I thought I’d use that as well for extra screen real estate. The thing was that I real­ly like the sym­met­ri­cal esthet­ics of my new set­up, com­bined with not real­ly need­ing the extra screen, I decid­ed to take it away. One of my rules while trad­ing is to stay off social media etc. so with only enough screen real estate for the essen­tials in trad­ing I have less temptation.

My set­up is placed on top of the Skars­ta stand­ing desk by, of course, IKEA. Who else would come up with a name like that?! It’s nice but the table top has bend a bit where I placed the mon­i­tor mount. I’m think­ing to replace it with a stronger one in the future and will sure­ly update you on that. Oth­er­wise the desk is nice. I have the one with the man­u­al crank for putting the desk in stand­ing or sit­ting posi­tion. It’s OK to use since I will only put it up or down 2 times a day. If you would need to do it more often I wouldn’t rec­om­mend this but then again.. What’s wrong with you get­ting up and down the whole time?! 😛

So how’s this all actu­al­ly useful?

I found this nice piece of soft­ware called Dis­play­Fu­sion. It’s basi­cal­ly soft­ware that can divide your screens in any way you want. Among oth­er things. I have my trad­ing plat­form on the ultra­w­ide at the top. Under­neath it I have my 24 inch where I do my jour­nal­ing etc. Basi­cal­ly the inter­est­ing part will be this bot­tom monitor. 

Then I use Dis­play­Fu­sion to sep­a­rate my screens in the fol­low­ing way. In the mid­dle I have my trad­ing jour­nal. On the left I have this Win­dows app called News­flow open. News­flow allows me to sub­scribe to cer­tain web­sites like investing.com etc. and deliv­ers new arti­cles to my desk. On the top right I have a timer that I use for day trad­ing. My cell phone alerts me when it’s prime time. This is the time that I have decid­ed big­ger moves will hap­pen or are in oth­er ways more crit­i­cal than oth­er times. As soon as my cell phone alarm goes off I start the count­down timer on the top right cor­ner of my screen. Dur­ing this time I watch price action close­ly. On the bot­tom right cor­ner I have the price lev­els I deemed crit­i­cal to watch. By the way, if you’d like me to send you the excel sheet just send me a mes­sage and I’ll be more than hap­py to oblige. Basi­cal­ly I fill in the lev­els I deem inter­est­ing and it cal­cu­lates the dis­tance that I am away from said levels. 

Show me your setup!

Alright, that’s it for me. I’d love to see your set­up if you’d like to share it with me. If you have any ques­tions or sug­ges­tions on mine please feel free to comment.