Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
Exactly the reason I've went with Azure too, and have been very satisfied with it.
With dedicated.com, you have to manage more stuff, like a sysadmin.
There's also speedytradingservers. It's listed in the elite discounts section of this site.
They also give a free 1 week trial, and the pricing is about half off from a similar azure. But my problem with speedytradingservers was that they do not have the tools, like azure or AWS, to manage your own instance. I felt that someone from speedy could log into my instance, and see all my login credentials, etc.
I am worried about the 2 vCPU, too. I would prefer 2-4 cores. There are so many different configuration options, but for now this is working fine (I'm surprised, actually). I need to find out what is involved in upgrading if necessary.
Right now I am running just one strategy. I am testing it this week and don't want to disrupt my test cycle. I will increase the number of strategies and instruments Sunday night to perform a stress test. As you can see from the earlier screenshot, CPU usage is low (it was high during installs and some updates).
Here is info on the series that I am using (it is supposed to be a balance of power and memory): Azure VM Dv3 and Dsv3-series
So I just restarted my VM to enable trading when the market opens later. I will be running in sim, 6 instruments, all automated, on my current configuration: Standard D2s v3 (2 vcpus, 8 GiB memory)
Cost
As seen above, I have used about $10 so far. So they bill by the minute, and I have a $200 credit to try the VM. To me this translates to about $10 per day, or 20 trading days, or just under 1 month. I'm sure I will know if this is working. So that is what is free. The B1 configuration is free for 720 hours, but is way underpowered.
In the Pay-as-you-go model, you pay for your box by the minute. So powering down when not in use will save $$$. However, for being on 5 days/week, 24 hours a day for a given trading week, it is cheaper to pay by the month. It will be even cheaper by the year or 3 year.
I will report back on if this configuration can handle 6 simultaneous strategies.
The cheapest option is to commit to the 3 years because you still only pay it monthly. You can always break your commitment and stop paying before the 3 years is up. Worst case is azure bans your account, but from experience I know that you can just make a new account and start fresh with them again. I'd recommend committing to the 3 years for the cheapest rate, but make sure it's on a new throwaway azure account that aren't running other VMS for your other businesses.
Here is the CPU utilization for the past 24 hours:
I powered up the VM early Sunday afternoon. I ran the Windows Update processes, so that took a while to complete. Once that was done, I added my workspaces, compiled my two strategies, and downloaded the chart data.
TradeStation Specifics:
1 desktop
1 workspace for each chart: 6 instruments in total
TradeManager in one workspace
TradeManager Analysis in one workspace
Total of 8 workspaces
Only one indicator is enabled, just for my reference
46 round trips as of 1030 ET Monday
CPU utilization averages about 10%. That is about right, when compared to my regular workstation. The VM is intended for live trading only, so I won't be optimizing or doing any other processor intensive activities on it.
The Bad
When I launched Remote Desktop this morning, it caused TradeStation to close with no warning. Not just a normal TradeStation crash.... it was as if TradeStation was not running at all. This happened Friday during some testing, as well. I will try to replicate and see if I can get some help from Azure support. It ran overnight with no problem (judging by the trades it made).
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals, U308 and Crypto.
Frequency: Many times daily
Duration: Never
Posts: 5,059 since Dec 2013
Thanks Given: 4,410
Thanks Received: 10,226
Not sure if its still the case, but the 'credit check' used to be done in Florida. Hence even if you are close to the price server, your actual order effectively goes from Chicago to Florida then back to Chicago.
For some reason I'm never surprised to learn that trading ISVs are doing something dumb, like a risk check in Florida, or routing everything through Connecticut.