Hello Mac fans,
As I have used a mac for about a decade now with NT8 I felt that I would lend my opinion on the current status and what is to come. I have a MacBook pro 2019 with an i9 processor that has 8 cores SSD HD and 64GB of RAM. I run my own NT8 strategy which is very involved and demands high resources. Despite my higher end computer, I cannot use Parallels (PLS) to emulate and trade with NT8. It may be OK for someone else...but with my strategy it is not. Therefore I must bootcamp (BC) and use all my resources in the Windows 10 environment to get me the power and speed I need. I ran Geekbench in my bootcamp environment and got a score of around 6500 multicore. I ran the same Geekbench in the Parallels environment (splitting the RAM 32/32) and got as score of 2700. That is just not good enough to run my strategy. Even with the 6500 score, I do get a bit of lag at market open running 8 charts with 8 strategies. As an aside, every time I change from BC to PLS or vice versa, my machine ID changes and I have to reapply my license and connection settings to NT brokerage. So now I have two reasons to pick ONE windows solution and stay with that. So when I trade, I am in bootcamp and when I finish my trading session at 10:30 EST, I reboot in to mac OS and proceed with my trading log and the rest of my day.
The future....
I have seen many videos on YouTube that reflect that the new Apple ARM M1X processor (rumored to be released in June) SHOULD produce a Geekbench score of roughly 12000-14000 with no significant heat issues (which slows the speed) and excellent battery life. This would be amazing! The real question is, what will the score be while emulating windows 10 in Parallels. As well all know, with the new ARM processors, there is NO BOOTCAMP option. If it can hit a Geekbench of 10000 or higher while emulating Windows, that that would be the BEST scenario in that I could run both windows/ MacOS simultaneously AND get faster speed at market open where I am getting the lag now.
If the M1X is NOT as fast as they say and I am determined to keep the responsiveness of NT8 brisk even at market open, I may have to purchase a dedicated windows computer with an AMD threadripper CPU (fastest currently). This one comes with 12-16 cores and is super fast. The only issue here is that CPU only comes in a desktop and I like to trade with a laptop. I can always, have the desktop sitting at my home office and remote in through my laptop if I am away from home trading though.
Lastly, I can purchase a VPS in the cloud to trade with. The downside there is that I am renting a server and for the same price I could buy the desktop I noted above. The upside is that the servers are in Chicago and the latency time would be very low resulting in min slippage.
So as a mac user who trades with NT, I wanted to lay out where I am now as well as my plans regarding the end of Bootcamp as I am sure there are many of us in the same boat.
I would love to hear input from other NT8 traders on mac regarding your plans as well.
Steven
As I have used a mac for about a decade now with NT8 I felt that I would lend my opinion on the current status and what is to come. I have a MacBook pro 2019 with an i9 processor that has 8 cores SSD HD and 64GB of RAM. I run my own NT8 strategy which is very involved and demands high resources. Despite my higher end computer, I cannot use Parallels (PLS) to emulate and trade with NT8. It may be OK for someone else...but with my strategy it is not. Therefore I must bootcamp (BC) and use all my resources in the Windows 10 environment to get me the power and speed I need. I ran Geekbench in my bootcamp environment and got a score of around 6500 multicore. I ran the same Geekbench in the Parallels environment (splitting the RAM 32/32) and got as score of 2700. That is just not good enough to run my strategy. Even with the 6500 score, I do get a bit of lag at market open running 8 charts with 8 strategies. As an aside, every time I change from BC to PLS or vice versa, my machine ID changes and I have to reapply my license and connection settings to NT brokerage. So now I have two reasons to pick ONE windows solution and stay with that. So when I trade, I am in bootcamp and when I finish my trading session at 10:30 EST, I reboot in to mac OS and proceed with my trading log and the rest of my day.
The future....
I have seen many videos on YouTube that reflect that the new Apple ARM M1X processor (rumored to be released in June) SHOULD produce a Geekbench score of roughly 12000-14000 with no significant heat issues (which slows the speed) and excellent battery life. This would be amazing! The real question is, what will the score be while emulating windows 10 in Parallels. As well all know, with the new ARM processors, there is NO BOOTCAMP option. If it can hit a Geekbench of 10000 or higher while emulating Windows, that that would be the BEST scenario in that I could run both windows/ MacOS simultaneously AND get faster speed at market open where I am getting the lag now.
If the M1X is NOT as fast as they say and I am determined to keep the responsiveness of NT8 brisk even at market open, I may have to purchase a dedicated windows computer with an AMD threadripper CPU (fastest currently). This one comes with 12-16 cores and is super fast. The only issue here is that CPU only comes in a desktop and I like to trade with a laptop. I can always, have the desktop sitting at my home office and remote in through my laptop if I am away from home trading though.
Lastly, I can purchase a VPS in the cloud to trade with. The downside there is that I am renting a server and for the same price I could buy the desktop I noted above. The upside is that the servers are in Chicago and the latency time would be very low resulting in min slippage.
So as a mac user who trades with NT, I wanted to lay out where I am now as well as my plans regarding the end of Bootcamp as I am sure there are many of us in the same boat.
I would love to hear input from other NT8 traders on mac regarding your plans as well.
Steven
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