My Swing Trading Computer | Podcast Episode #268

0:07
Hey, I’m Ryan Mallory, and this is my swing trading the stock market podcast. I’m here to teach you how to trade in a complex, ever changing world of finance. Learn what it means to trade profitably and consistently, managing risk, avoiding the pitfalls of trading, and most importantly, to let those winners run wild.

0:25
You can succeed at the stock market, and I’m ready to show you how. Hey everybody, this is Ryan Mallory with Swing Trading the stock market in today’s email. We’re gonna talk about trading computers. What is my setup? What do I like to have in a computer trading setup?

0:43
Now I may have done one of these before in the past, but as you guys know with technology, these things are always changing. Software is becoming more. Demanding the kinds of equipment or the kinds of setups that you need, needs to be better than what you had maybe 5 years ago or 4 years ago.

1:01
It’s just constantly changing. So I do like to revisit this conversation every once in a while. So this email comes from A person that we’re going to call Barney, Barney from Andy Griffith. I grew up watching that show, so I felt like, yeah, that might not be a bad name.

1:16
I saw it on TV the other day. We’re going with Barney and Barney writes, he again, Ryan. Thank you again for everything you do and for being so down to earth in your podcasts. I understand it’s not possible to answer all the questions you receive, but here I go anyways. What do you think is a good computer setup for trading?

1:32
Desktop or laptop, wired or wireless, one screen or multiple screens? What computer configuration, etc. What do you use? I still think it would be. if you make available your bourbon ratings as a list or something like that. Maybe it will bring increased traffic to your website. That could be the possibility.

1:47
I know I’ve had somebody ask it to me before and I just did like a copy and paste and I provided that. Maybe I can go ahead and do that. So let me write that as a to do. Maybe I can add that to the website. Lastly, what is the difference between shareplanner.com and swingtradingthestockmarket.com? Thank you and best regards, Barney.

2:05
So definitely some things to tackle here, but first, before I get started, what am I drinking for this podcast? I got McAfee Brothers benchmark Extra Strong foolproof bourbon. This is 125 proof. That means it’s 62.5% alcohol.

2:22
That’s a beast. Now, if you remember, two podcast episodes ago, I actually did a review on Benchmark, except that one was the benchmark Small batch. This one’s the foolproof, much, much stronger. Now, remember, it’s made by the Buffalo Trace Distillery. It’s bottled, it’s aged, it’s distilled by Buffalo Trace, and they even give you a little bit of a backstory on it here where it says in 1773, McAfee Brothers, three of them actually named James, George, and Robert left Virginia Westward to explore.

3:06
For the uncharted territories that would later be known as Kentucky, traveling by canoe at first, the McAfee Company eventually followed a native trail over land that led them to the great Buffalo Crossland, where the brothers surveyed the land now home to the world’s most award-winning distillery, Buffalo Trace Distillery.

3:31
The surveyor marks left behind are known as benchmarks, and this Kentucky Straight bourbon whiskey honors the pioneering spirit of these early American explorers. It says about the foolproof that Kentucky Straight bourbon whiskey is bottled at the same proof that it enters the barrel bold and robust, this 125 proof Kentucky Straight bourbon whiskey veils hints of chocolate, brown sugar and spice, sip and savor.

3:49
OK, so when I’m smelling this thing. I definitely pick up on the brown sugar. I even pick up a little bit of like, I don’t know if it’s like a raspberry or something or what. The good thing is, is that 125, it doesn’t burn the nose. So that’s a good start. Now to the taste. I gotta tell you, I don’t come across too much flavor on the taste.

4:12
It’s a little bit on the sweet side. But the finish is so fast, like it hits your heart. Now, I will say this, it’s not a throat burn where it, you know, chases you all the way down into your intestines and you can just feel the liquid just burn your insides like some of them do. There’s quite a few of them that can’t seem to figure out how to not let that happen, but this one does not do that, at least from the few sips that I’ve had so far.

4:28
But The burn does linger in your mouth. It’s almost like you get that hot pipe and pizza and you can’t wait for it to cool off enough before you take that first bite and you bite into it and you just pull all the cheese off and you burn the top of your mouth. Even though it’s not burning the top of my mouth, it has that feel that it’s been burned.

4:47
That’s at least what it feels like to me. It’s kind of like burning your mouth on pizza. It’s not bad. Like, I could sip this and everything. The problem with sipping it is that it’s 125 proof. I’m if I’m doing that every night of as an everyday sipper, holy cow, I think I would probably be checking myself in somewhere.

5:04
So definitely don’t think it’s an everyday sipper, maybe a weekend sipper, but it’s not bad at all. It’s like 24 bucks for a full bottle. You get a little bit of an ethanol taste at the end, which I’m not crazy about, but again, it doesn’t, you know, throat burn you, so. This one’s hard. I don’t think it’s as good as the small batch one.

5:22
I’m gonna go ahead and give it a 6.5 for this review. 6.5, benchmark foolproof. Now, Let’s talk about Barney’s questions. Now, kind of like managing risk, everybody has a different risk profile.

5:39
Everybody has different needs as it pertains to what kind of trading computer they need. For swing trading or day trading. You’ve probably seen some of the memes out there about people who just completely overkill it. They’ll have 20 monitors and they’ll have charts golore like they could actually look at all those.

5:56
When I first started off, I went kind of haywire, not to that extent, but I remember I had 4 video graphic cards on my computer. It was so hot in my room. I couldn’t even get the temperature below like 88 degrees in my room. And remember, I live in Florida, so It’s hot in the summertime.

6:12
I would be trading shirtless with boxers on. I’m not trying to give you a visual here, but that’s essentially what I was trading. It was that hot. Eventually a friend came over and says, hey, why don’t you put one of those ACs in the window that can cool you down. It’s not like I was living in a trailer park somewhere. I mean, I was living in a home with centralized AC and everything.

6:28
The AC in the house could not cool down the room, that 8 monitors, and eventually, I think I even expanded it to like 11 monitors. The video graphics cards fans were running nonstop. They eventually burned out over time. They could only hold two monitors at once.

6:44
Dude, it was so hot in there. Again, shirtless and trading in boxes. That was what I was doing. It was that hot. Now wintertime came, computer was pretty nice to have in there. It was heating up the room quite nicely, even though Florida doesn’t have what you would call a crazy winter.

6:59
Nonetheless, it paid dividends during that season of the year. But do I think you need 8 screens for trading? No, I don’t. My current setup is 4, and I’ll get into that more in a little bit. Why do I have 4? But 4 works well for me.

7:16
I think most people could probably do it with 2 or 3 screens. But just recently, I bought a brand new computer and I went a little bit ape on it. I actually got it from Cyber Power PC and the gaming computers are really cool. You don’t need the lights or anything, of course, for it, although they can be pretty cool.

7:38
For me, I didn’t really opt for them. I think there’s a couple of lights on my computer, but not really the whole enchilada. I got the hyperliquid Black Mamba and it’s a really good computer now. It cost me over $5000 to get it, but then again, Doing YouTube videos and stuff like that, it goes a little bit beyond trading to where I need to be able to do like the editing for videos and the podcast and the rendering and everything else.

7:55
So that was important for me to be able to have that. Now, it says it’s a computer that’s, you know, virtual reality ready. do I use it for that? No. But what it does have, it has a 12th generation i9 processor. That’s what I like. I also think that at a Bare Minimum, it’s good to have 32 gigabytes of RAM in your computer, and that’s readily available.

8:11
You can find them at Costco’s now. You can find them at Sam’s. Very, very available. Best Buy probably has them as well. So 32 gigabytes of RAM. I like the processors that are a little bit more high end just because that they can handle going through charts at a faster rate, or at least that’s been my experience.

8:28
I use The GForce 3090 video card. Really hard to come by these days. I think I was a little bit on the lucky side when I found them. I don’t even think they sell it with that particular model anymore. But again, that high level of a graphics card is not necessary.

8:48
I think the solid state drives are good to have in your computers just because your computer can process things a lot faster when it’s a solid state drive versus your more traditional hard drives. And again, I’m not a computer techie by any means, and there’s probably people listening to this that I might be using lingo that’s driving some of you guys crazy, but I have a 2 terabyte solid state drive and a backup drive on top of that.

9:04
Now, the reason why I say go after the gaming computers back in the day, like when I made the computer that could support like 8 monitors, plus I had another computer with another 3 monitors on it, those computers had to be custom built. I had I think I went to TigerDirect.com and built them. And I had a friend that helped me with it because I wasn’t that great at building them.

9:21
But now, desktops have come back in a big, big way, particularly. Really with how many people are playing video games again on their desktops for a while there, like 2012, for instance, not many people were doing that. Fast forward 10 years later, a lot of people are doing it. People are streaming their video games, so they need the desktops.

9:43
And so instead of going out and building a custom trading computer, it’s very easy to just go find a really good gaming computer that meets your needs and this is the. Buy it from there, like, for instance, cyberpowered PC. It was really good. I mean, they were pretty quick about the whole thing. Now, in terms of the monitors that I have, I have 224 inch monitors that are right in front of me and then I have a 32 inch monitor that is to the left of me.

10:01
The 32 inch monitor I’d like to use for my brokerage account just so that I can see a lot of charts really quickly on the Think or swim platform. Also, I use the two other charts for going through the internet, web surfing and all that stuff. And then I have a horizontal chart, one of those widescreen monitors, and I put it horizontal.

10:19
So instead of a landscape, I use my monitor as a portrait. That’s really good too, especially for windows that you might want to stack on top of each other instead of going side by side. I wasn’t a huge fan of. Windows 11 at first, but that’s really nice too, because they let you actually section off pieces of your computer screen to different modules in a very easy way.

10:36
Now, I used to trade, check this out. I went from one extreme to the other. When I went from 11 monitors, I went down to one monitor and that one monitor was like a 55 inch TV essentially. It was a 4K TV and I got software because at the time, Windows 11 wasn’t out, this was years ago.

10:52
And I had to buy like a software that sectioned off my TV into different quadrants and everything. I think I had like 6 quadrants on the screen. And that was pretty good too, but then again, you feel like you’re sitting on the front row of a movie theater when you’re looking at a screen that big. So I don’t know if I would recommend that, though, it’s not the worst option.

11:07
I think sitting in your box there’s shirtless in a room that’s, you know, borderline 90 degrees, probably is the worst option. But at the time, I had left my full-time job and you just kept fighting through it. You didn’t even think about it too much. Now, you can go to like Best Buy, you can get some good computers there.

11:27
Costco’s has some really good ones. I almost bought. The computer from Costco’s, but they were just not available during the time that I was looking for them, and they kept going out of stock as soon as I tried to place an order. So that’s when I went to Cyber Power PC. Actually got a better one at Cyber Power PC, but I also probably paid about $1500 more for that computer to get the better accessories.

11:42
But in terms of what you’re paying for at Costco’s versus going to a cyberpowered PC, it’s pretty much the same. Also, Barney asked me, what’s the difference between swingtradingthestockmarket.com and the trading block on shareplanner.com. So that’s a good question. I get that question a lot.

12:09
And the main difference is swingtradingthestockmarket.com, which you guys can go to. It’s, it’s something that supports this podcast. You get on my market research, but what you don’t get is you don’t get my alerts. You don’t get the actual trades that I’m making real time. swingtradingthestockmarket.com lets you know what I’m looking at, what I’m considering trading, my different watch lists, updates on the market, updates on all the fang stocks and the big tech stocks, and now we’re doing a whole bunch of videos now.

12:25
We’re still doing charts, but we’re not just making it pictures of charts. We’re also doing videos where I’m talking to it, which allows me to cover a whole lot more information for you guys. So that’s a new feature of swingtradingthestockmarket.com. You also get all that in trading block, but you also get a chat room. You also have me in there every day.

12:45
I’ll mark up charts for you. We do. Live streams a few times a week plus you get all my trade alerts. So if I’m getting in the QID for instance, I’m getting in and I’m letting you know where I’m going to get in at. I’m letting you know when I’m taking profits, where my stop losses, when I get knocked out of a trade, if it’s because my stop loss got hit or where I booked my profits at because it was a winning trade.

13:05
So that’s the main difference between that. So I guess that was a question that actually gave me an opportunity to plug my services a little bit. So, check those out. shareplanner.com has the trading block. And then you can go to www.shareplanner.com/trading-block or if you want something a little bit more scaled down, swingtradingthestockmarket.com gives you all my stock market research.

13:23
I do like a Windows-based computer over an Apple computer. I have an Apple phone. I do a lot of stuff with Apple, but in terms of a desktop, I just like the Windows a lot better. I know the lines are getting a little bit more blurred in terms of everything that you can get on a Windows, you can pretty much get on a Mac now, but I like.

13:41
To be able to customize it a little bit more fluidly and if I need to pull some RAM out, I can do that. I don’t know if you can do that with the Apple or not. I know in the past it didn’t seem like you could, but for the me Windows, maybe I’m just old school, but I think they’re a little bit better in terms of customization and just being able to use them for a longer period of time.

14:02
Now, like the computer I have, one of the reasons why I went ape on it and just got a really good one is because I want it to last me for 5 or 6 years. The ones that have not as good specs on it. They’re probably not gonna last you as long, not because that they will break down on you, but just because the technology will improve so much that new software or new features will be more taxing on.

14:19
A computer with not as good as specs. I noticed a tremendous difference when I was using the charting platform TC 2000 between my old computer and my new one. It sounds crazy, but I could tell that it was about a half second faster or a quarter second faster maybe between charts. When I was pressing the space bar and going between charts, it popped up a lot faster.

14:37
I always thought that that was probably an internet thing that was determining the speed between going from one chart to the next, but it was actually the computer processor that showed a dramatic improvement in that area. And in In terms of trading platforms, I do like TC 2000. There’s information in the podcast notes that you can access TC Tech 2000 through.

14:57
Really good setup. I’ve been using that probably since 2010, maybe even before that, maybe 2008. I can’t remember specifically, but they are a phenomenal platform and they’re constantly improving. Trading view is right behind them. Some people prefer them over TC 2000. I think that’s fine. They’re both come with a cost, but I think that if you want to be serious about your trading, you need a good charting platform.

15:20
Now, in terms of laptops, I don’t like working off of laptops. I do it if I’m on travel and everything, and it’s not that I can’t do it. It’s just that I like being at a desk. I like having a comfortable chair. I don’t like being hunched over a tiny screen. What I did recently, and I went on to Amazon, you can get these portable monitors that you can just plug into your laptop, and what it does is it gives you multiple screens and some of them even mount onto your laptop.

15:43
My laptop right now actually has 3 screens. I actually broke one. which kind of stunk on travel, but I still have two screens on my laptop. One just extends out from my laptop to the side, really, really, really handy. And that allows me to be able to do other things cause you gotta remember, when I’m doing my trading, I’m also, you know, doing SharePlanner and I’m also at night doing my podcasts, I’m doing videos and stuff like that.

16:00
So it is a multi-purpose computer. And so that’s one of the reasons why I do use 4 screens. Now, in terms of a laptop when I’m on travel, I’m not doing. And all those things. I’m primarily just trading and updating SharePlanner and chatting in the chat room and updating swingtradingthestockmarket.com. When I’m doing all of that, definitely need about 2 monitors to be able to do that.

16:17
Even if I wasn’t doing all those things just from a trading standpoint, I want to be able to have the market in front of me at all times. That’s where that second monitor comes into play, and I want to be able to navigate to different websites that I need to, or use a different charting platform that might go beyond my brokerage platform.

16:35
So to wrap it up, one of the things that I would tell you is focus on the gaming computers. There’s a lot of them out there now and it seems like the inventory is starting to get a little bit better with those. I think the better computer that you get, the longer it’s going to last just because from a technological advancement standpoint, computers that are at the most high end tend to last a lot longer.

16:57
In terms of monitors, I don’t think anybody needs like more than 4 monitors to really trade. I think if all you’re doing with your. Computer is trading, you’re fine with 2 monitors. 3 is probably a little bit nicer. Most of your video cards can support up to 4 monitors. That’s also nice as well. You can also get monitor stands that clamp onto your desk and allow you to hang the, the monitors off of these poles that clamp onto your desk.

17:20
My desk for also worth mentioning comes from IKEA. You get these like what they call Alex drawers and then I just get one of these big old counters. things that you can sell one of these winning countertops that they sell at Costco’s, not a Costco’s, but IKEA. IKEA. Yeah, you get it at IKEA, you have the Alex drawers, you buy two Alex drawers and just slap a countertop right on top of them. sturdy of a desk as you’ll ever ask for.

17:39
It’s really good. I’ve been using it for probably about 5 years now, and it is really, really solid. So that’s about all I have to say about. My computer trading desk, my computer set up, and what it looks like from a trading standpoint for me each and every day. If you have any questions, feel free to keep sending me your emails ryan@shareplanner.com.

17:54
I do read them and I try to put almost every one of them on the air. And make sure to check out swingtradingthestockmarket.com for supporting the podcast in the process. I greatly appreciate it. Thank you guys, and God bless. Thanks for listening to my podcast Swing Trading the stock market.

18:13
I’d like to encourage you to join me in the SharePlanner trading block where I navigate the stock market each day with traders from around the world. With your membership, you will get a 7-day trial and access to my trading room, including alerts via text, And WhatsApp. So go ahead, sign up by going to shareplanner.com/tradingblock.

18:30
That’s www.shareplanner.com/trading-block, and follow me on SharePlanner’s Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook where I provide unique market and trading information every day. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at ryan@shareplanner.com. All the best to you and I look forward to trading with you soon.