userque 

In your case, a virus scanner would just be added security...insurance. Properly configured, it won't need many resources; so why not. Are you making millisecond trades? No. Not from home. You don't know what you don't know. Zero day exploits are real. Just my humble opinion.

Just to be clear, "you don't know what you don't know" -- what do you mean by that exactly?


Can you explain how a zero-day exploit would be handled by any kind of security software... being a zero day exploit?

josh 

Just to be clear, "you don't know what you don't know" -- what do you mean by that exactly? Can you explain how a zero-day exploit would be handled by any kind of security software... being a zero day exploit?

You don't know what you don't know means that an exploit attack vector may arise that you were previously unaware of. You seem to believe that as long as you don't do x, y, and z; you'll be fine. But you do do a, b, and c; which is currently safe to do; but you assume will also be safe in the future.

If a, b, and c should someday also be exploitable, your antivirus might be there to save the day.

Zero day exploits will eventually become known. Your antivirus will be notified before you hear about the exploit on the tv news.

Again, unless you are trading in milliseconds, what harm comes to you by using Window's defender. Properly configured, it uses little resources.




I have no skin in your game. My posts are mainly for the readers that may be influenced by yours.

BTW ... good luck in these rough markets now!!

fivewhy 

@ josh , I was wondering if you've ever tried to trade from a Windows virtual machine running on a Linux machine. Have you? I was thinking with a high thread count processor (eg, 3950X) and about 64GB of ram, there would be enough hardware to support running a trading machine as a virtual machine on a Linux box. Or do you think the overhead of the virtual environment would outweigh any potential benefits? Do you even see any benefits to doing this, even if it could be done?

@ fivewhy
I used to do exactly this. However, I built a separate windows machine (with identical hardware) because I actually did have some difficulty.

I used virtualbox. On more than one occasion, there was an issue with the video driver that caused the window to change resolutions to a default 800x600 or so, and so my entire window immediately shrank down, and my trading software's windows (sierra chart) were all out of alignment. Needless to say, this would happen at the most inopportune times... Also, the max VRAM available to the hypervisor was 256MB.

I have read of issues with AMD cpu's and Virtualbox 6+, and this was a likely culprit. This flies in the face of my earlier "AMD is as good as Intel" but this is not an AMD issue, it's a vbox issue I think.

Given modern cpu virtualization support, you are not likely to see a slowdown in general running on a VM, because most non-trapping CPU instructions are handled natively on the CPU as if the instructions were running without a hypervisor. Only if you have lots of privileged instructions (opening a file and other I/O, for one example) will you see issues. Trading software will certainly have this, but to what degree depends on several factors.

I also ran sierra chart on Wine, which was actually not too bad, but with this comes font and scaling issues.

Nothing beats the experience of running natively on windows, the OS for which the software was designed, though. But I suggest you give it a try; perhaps it will suit your needs exactly. For me, I needed my computer for other work purposes anyway and prefer to keep my trading system as streamlined as possible.