First of all you have to ask yourself if you need a server. If you are at home all day long you probably don't need it. But some of us traders need to get to work and we all know that letting a strategy run at home isn't exactly the safest thing to do.
What can go wrong? Well the platform can lose its internet connection. In worst case scenario you got an open position without any stop. Of course you could equip you strategy with an emergency stop at all time . See http://ctltrading.blogspot.com/2011/05/protect-your-equity-at-all-time.html But that kind of exit wasn't probably the exit you had in mind. Another scenario, less severe but oh so frustrating. You come home from work. You had started a trend following strategy before you went to work. And.... you hear on the news that the pair has gone up more than 1%. In the evening you check how much profit you strategy took and you find out that the platform lost its connection 20 minutes before the pair went up.
Other problems that can occur. The kids playing flash games on your PC. The wife accidentally pulling out the power cord while cleaning. A outage.......
How can you intervene when you got problems like that when you are not at home? Well you could setup a cheap “server”. If you got an old PC somewhere you are good to go. For dealbook it should be at least a Pentium 4. If possible format the PC and install a clean windows. A light virus scanner will do. Keep it as clean as possible. If you are worrying about the power consumption you could go for a powerful netbook. The advance of a netbook is that it very tiny and it has a low power consumption. For the internet connection try to avoid a wireless connection if possible. Wireless connection can have tiny interruptions. Finally you install the platform of course. Dealbook or meta trader 4.
Last step install remote desktop software. Remote desktop software lets you take over the desktop of you PC at home. This way you can work on the PC at home from a PC at work. I use teamviewer but there are plenty of software packets available for this. I like teamviewer because the graphics have an acceptable quality when I take over the PC that is running at home.
When I am working I check my server at home at regular intervals to see how the strategy is doing. If your employer doesn't like you to check that often. You give it another approach. You let the strategy send you a discrete SMS each hour for example. Each time you hear your cellphone giving that signal you know it is still running. That way you only have to check when their really is a problem.
By the way for letting your strategy sending you an SMS you use the alert(“sms”,”.....”); command.
In the platform you should have entered your phone number. For that you go to
=> file
=> configure
=> parameters
Be careful with remote desktop software that doesn't support encryption. You don't want a unsecure connection. Teamviewer uses full encryption with a key exhange and AES encoding.
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