As a Forex, Crypto or Financial Futures trader, your home office is not just a room with a desk, it is the environment in which you make decisions that directly affect your financial wellbeing. After more than 15 years trading professionally from home, I have come to appreciate that the quality of your physical setup has a genuine and measurable impact on your mindset, your concentration, and ultimately your performance.
I receive a steady stream of questions about my setup, so I have put together this comprehensive guide to my setup. I have updated this page fully for 2026 with my current equipment.
The Chair: Start here
If you take nothing else from this page, take this: buy the best chair you can afford. You may spend six, eight, or more hours a day in it. A poor chair does not just cause discomfort, over time it causes back, neck and shoulder problems that will affect your focus, your mood and your longevity as a trader.
Chairs are deeply personal, and what works for one person may not suit another. I use the Herman Miller Aeron Remastered. It is not cheap, but it is an investment I have never regretted. The lumbar support, breathable mesh back and extensive adjustability mean I can sit comfortably for long sessions without the fidgeting and discomfort that plagued me with lesser chairs.
The Desk
I keep my desk as uncluttered as possible. The principle is simple: only what I need for today sits on the desk. Everything else is stored or out of sight. Visual clutter creates mental clutter, and mental clutter is the last thing you want when you are trying to read a market.
My desk is a glass desk, which looks clean but does create cable management challenges. More on that below.
The PC and Monitors
I sourced my PC, monitors and stand from Multiple Monitors, who specialise in exactly this kind of multi-screen trading setup.
The PC I purchased is a “Trader PC” with six ViewSonic 27″ 144Hz QHD, 1MS Gaming Widescreen Monitors supported by one six monitor synergy stand.
PC Specs
CPU: Intel i9 3.7–5.3GHz
RAM: 32GB
Primary Storage: 500GB SSD
Secondary Storage: 1TB HDD
Graphics Card 1: nVidia RTX 3060 8GB
Graphics Card 2: nVidia GTX 1050Ti 4GB
Two graphics cards are required to drive six monitors at high resolution. The RTX 3060 handles four screens; the 1050Ti handles the remaining two.
Keyboard and Mouse
I’m using the SteelSeries Apex 3 mechanical keyboard and a Logitech MX Master 3 mouse which stands on a Corsair mousepad. The MX Master 3 in particular is excellent, the ergonomics are superb for long sessions and the scroll wheel precision is useful when navigating charts.
Audio
The sound is powered by Creative T100 speakers paired with a Sennheiser headset for when I need to record, make calls or simply focus and block out background noise. Good headphones are underrated in a home office and being able to create an audio environment you control is genuinely useful for concentration.
Internet Connection and Power
This section is missing from most home office guides but it is critically important for traders.
Your internet connection is mission-critical infrastructure. A dropped connection at the wrong moment, when you are in a trade, managing a position, or trying to exit, can be extremely costly. I run on a wired ethernet connection rather than Wi-Fi wherever possible. Wi-Fi is convenient but introduces latency variability and the occasional inexplicable drop.
I also maintain a 5G mobile backup connection. If my primary broadband goes down, I can switch to mobile data immediately without interrupting my trading day. This is not paranoia, broadband outages happen, and they always seem to happen at the worst possible moment.
Cable Management
Cable management on a glass desk with six monitors is a genuine challenge. My solution was straightforward and inexpensive: I built a custom cable tray using two wooden panels from B&Q, screwed together with four metal angle brackets and painted the same colour as the wall. The cables are tidied with Gocableties cable ties and run through the box, completely out of sight from the front.
It took an afternoon to build and has kept the desk clean ever since. A clutter-free desk contributes to a calmer mindset. It sounds trivial, but it genuinely makes a difference.
Charting
Swing & Short Term Strategy: TradingView
TradingView is my primary charting platform for swing trading and broader market analysis. It is browser-based, which means it works anywhere and the alert system is excellent for monitoring levels when you are away from the desk.
Execution
Swing Strategy: CMC Markets
CMC Markets is my execution platform for swing trades.. Their platform is clean and spreads are competitive.
Short Term Strategy: Currently I trade for ARB TG and use Trading Technologies’ X-Trader.
News
For news, I use Newsquawk as my primary news source. It is an audio and text feed that squawks market-moving news in real time, seconds ahead of most retail sources. I know it is fashionable in some circles to ignore news entirely and trade purely from price action but I disagree with this approach. News moves markets. You do not have to trade the news to benefit from knowing when it is coming and understanding its impact.
I also use XPro formerly known as TweetDeck, now rebranded following X’s rebrand from Twitter, to monitor specific accounts throughout the trading day.
X can be a significant distraction if you follow too many people indiscriminately. The advantage of XPro is the column system, which lets you build curated feeds of specific accounts. My setup includes a dedicated “news” column containing only institutional-grade breaking news sources, and a separate column for a small number of traders whose commentary I find genuinely useful. The noise is filtered out entirely.
Trading Journal
I use EdgeWonk to record my trades and analyse my performance.
Journalling is not optional if you want to improve as a trader. Your trading journal is the only objective record of your actual performance — stripped of the selective memory and post-hoc rationalisation that most traders apply to their results.
EdgeWonk allows you to tag trades by setup type, session, instrument and a range of other variables, and then run analytics across those tags. Over time this tells you which setups are genuinely profitable for you, which sessions you perform best in, and where your edge actually lies versus where you think it lies. These two things are often very different.