Setting Up Your Home Office

As a Forex, Crypto or Financial Futures Trader, you may find you spend many hours each day in front of your screens. As a result, it is of vital importance that your home office is set up effectively because your working environment has a direct influence on your mindset and of course your mindset has a huge impact on your trading performance.

I receive many questions about my home setup so I thought I would share it with you.

Perhaps the most important piece of furniture that you need to consider is your desk chair. You don’t want to be spending extended periods of time in a chair that is uncomfortable or, worse, actually causes you back pain. Chairs are a very personal thing; what one person finds comfortable another may not. I use the Herman Miller Aeron Remastered.

When it comes to my desk, I try to keep it free of clutter and only have what I need in front of me, for the day ahead, at any one time.

I purchased my PC, stand and monitors from Multiple Monitors.

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.

The basic PC specs are – i9 3.7-5.3GHz CPU | 32GB RAM | 500 GB SSD |1 TB Second Hard Drive.

It is powered by two graphics cards: The nVidia RTX 3060 8Gb and a nVidia GTX 1050Ti 4gb.

I’m using the SteelSeries Apex 5 mechanical keyboard and a Logitech MX Master 3 mouse which stands on a Corsair mousepad.

The sound is powered by Creative T100 speakers paired with Bose headphones.

I also have a HyperX QuadCast S microphone for broadcasting.

As you can imagine, cable management on a glass desk can be tricky. I used two wooden panels (from B&Q) which I screwed together with four metal angles and then painted the same colour as my wall. The PC cables are tied with Gocableties and then run through the makeshift box.

Charting

For charting, I use TradingView for my swing trading strategy. It allows me to chart every asset class I trade including Crypto.

Broker:

CMC Markets is my primary broker for my swing strategy. I spread bet as here in the UK, gains are tax-free.

News

For news, I use Newsquawk which is an audio feed for traders, squawking up-to-the-second market new. These days it’s in vogue to “ignore news” and concentrate on price but I think that’s a mistake since news moves markets. I personally don’t trade the figures anymore but there are still many opportunities to profit from a timely squawk.

I also use TweetDeck which enables me to keep track of who I follow on Twitter. I have heard people say they find Twitter to be a distraction and it certainly can be if you follow large numbers of people who are all vying for your attention during the trading day. The advantage of TweetDeck is that it allows you to build columns which you can then populate with specific tweeters. As an example, you could have a column called “news” that only contains sources of market-moving breaking news. I find this very useful to effectively organise the information I receive during the day.

Trading Journal

I use EdgeWonk to record my trades and analyse my performance.