The hedge funds buying up FPGAs and SLC SSDs beg to differ. If your goal is to be able to click “buy” to place your odd lot orders, then yes, it’s overkill. If you’re running real-time, continuously-optimizing models with big kid money, then fast is never fast enough.

Hi Karen,

I work as a high frequency portfolio manager at a small fund. I realize that your post is now a few months old, but a few points:

-For backtesting and analytics, it absolutely pays to have a fast SSD. When I built my workstation a year and a half go, I went with one of the less expensive PCIe options (a 300gb OCZ Z-Drive R4, which was $2300). Now, you have plenty of cheaper PCIe options, and even some NVMe drives like the Intel 750 trickling out. Any of these will make a major difference if you’re dealing with bulk data or running a local database server.
-Reliability is obviously key. I have tried running workstations with gaming cards, and it’s all well and good until the game-optimized driver that updates itself every few days (to be on the bleeding edge of performance) crashes during the trading day. This is not rare- gamers have different needs, and often the latest drivers will cause issues, which is fine for them. Get a much more reliable, stable, cheap, cool-running NVS card, like the NVS510 or older NVS450. I had 1 of each in my 8 monitor workstation, and they were just fantastic. They are not for gaming, but they’re exactly what you and I need.
-On the CPU- I am a big, big fan of even a single-CPU Xeon E5 build. You can support a lot more RAM, which is again huge for backtesting and simulations. If you need more power, or might down the road, you can always get a dual CPU motherboard and add a second CPU later on.

Hope this helps.

Trading? Most of that setup is insane overkill for that. What a waste of money…

That board has the PCIe 3.0×4 so your best bet IMHO would be the Samsung XP941 right now. We haven’t got word whatsoever on the timing of any retail release for this product. If you want to give me a day or two, I will check as there is a great deal of interest however.