The idea behind this website is to try and answer questions such as ‘which computer is best for trading?’, that’s a question I get asked a lot and the answer is pretty complicated actually.
Before I get into why I decided to create an entire website to answer questions like this, I’d like to give you a bit of background on myself and my company, Multiple Monitors.
Who Am I?
My name is Darren and I’m the founder of the Multiple Monitors Ltd business, we are based in the UK and supply multi-screen computers, stands and a whole lot of monitors to customers across the UK and Europe.
I started the business way back in 2008 after seeing a gap in the market for a dedicated multi-screen computing supplier.
To cut a long story short, we quickly realised that Traders (in one form or another) were our main customers, so we started tailoring our systems and solutions to better meet their needs.
Fast forward to the present, I’d estimate around 80% of our sales are to traders and financial professionals.
Questions and Answers and More Questions
During the course of my typical week I often speak to people looking for a new computer system to trade from. These chats often include questions such as ‘which PC is best for trading?’, to which I generally answer with ‘which trading platforms are you using?’, ‘how many screens do you want to run?’, ‘will you be running just 1 platform or multiple platforms?’, and ‘will you be using the computer for anything else whilst trading?’.
The answers to my follow up questions usually lead me to recommending one system over another, this works well most of the time.
There are some conversations I have which go a different route though, they start off similar but then vector off into something along the lines:
‘My friend told me I need an i7’
‘Someone in a forum said that AMD processors are better value than Intel’
‘I want to run 4 screens so I need a really high powered graphics card to make the screens update faster’
Whilst I’m happy to explain why some of these opinions may be slightly wrong, I’ve also come to realise that when I say something (or put something on our website), essentially I’m just adding my opinion to the mix.
Yes, in my mind, I think my opinion carries more weight than some anonymous commenter on a forum who has likely never built a computer before in their life, but without some form of trust I can be dismissed as quickly as the next person.
So, how do we get around this problem? I think the answer lies in looking at real data, let’s actually perform some tests, and try to understand why one component is better than another for certain jobs.
If we have data and graphs to look at we can say, with confidence, and show real evidence, as to why you should go for an i5 over an i3, or why that £900 graphics card you were considering is massively overkill.
That’s the premise of this website, to look at benchmarks and test results of real world hardware and components, to determine what is the best combination of equipment to power your trading sessions.
Why a new Website?
There are a few reasons why we have decided to put together a new website for this task.
Firstly, I think that being a standalone website will help us get this information ‘out there’ without it being instantly dismissed as marketing talk.
We don’t want to hide the fact that this site is a part of the Multiple Monitors company, however I do think that reading a discussion about computer hardware, on a website primarily focused on selling some of the hardware discussed, might dilute the trust-worthiness in some readers minds.
Secondly, and this is closely related to the first point, I would like this site to become a ‘go to’ resource for anyone looking for information about trading on their computers, whether they are a customer of ours or not.
Obviously if we achieve our goals for this site then that will likely have a positive impact on our overall business, however I see such a lot of plainly bad advice circulating, that I think it would be nice to have a place where people can actually see clear data rather than rely on misinformed opinions.
Finally, restructuring our main website to accommodate all this information and to allow comments and feedback would have been a big undertaking, this would have delayed us getting this information out there.
Hopefully I’ve cleared up the thinking behind this website, now, let’s get started with looking at some tests.