What's up everybody? All right? So today I'm gonna walk you through setting up a simple trading station. Now the reason I'm making this video is because every single week I get emailed the same question a beginner trader will say: Ross I want to get into trading and I think I'm going to need a new computer What type of computer should I get? well Ross I want to set up external monitors like the ones that I have back there but I don't know what monitors to buy, what cables I'll need or I bought the monitors I bought the cables I plugged them in and all they have is a black screen. So I'm gonna walk you through setting up a simple trading station now. This video has a lot of overlap with my travelling trading station video because my traveling trading station is a very simple setup so you'll notice a little bit of overlap there.

But of course, a big differentiator is that for a travelling station you need a laptop, whereas for just a simple station you can use a desktop computer if you want. Alright, so let's get into this video and start breaking down a simple trading station. So the first item on your equipment list is the computer. So when it comes to picking out a computer for trading, what? I Always recommend is that you pick out a computer that's branded as a gaming computer.

And that's because a gaming computer is almost always going to be much faster than just regular off-the-shelf computers. So what we look for specifically is a solid state hard drive. A solid-state hard drive is a little bit of a newer type of hard drive and it runs a lot faster without overheating than the traditional disk spinning hard drives. Now you want to be careful, you don't get a hybrid.

Some computers have the old disk and a new solid state hard drive kind of side-by-side You don't want to do that, just get a new one that has a dedicated usually 256 gigabyte solid state hard drive. Now the second thing a gaming computer will have is a lot of RAM and that's your memory. So a typical laptop that you just buy. you know, whatever a lower-end model might have 8 gigabytes.

we want to have 16 gigabytes if possible 32 gigabytes. If you have a desktop computer and you can go higher, that's great. But 16 to 32 is usually just fine now. I Like to use a laptop and that's partly because of the way I work I'm someone who works 12 to 14 hours a day and so I start the morning in bed I open my laptop and I check the scanners I check the news.

then I make my way back down to my office around lunchtime I work in the kitchen for a little bit in the afternoon I Often either go back to my office or I work on the couch in the evenings I usually work in the couch and then I finish up the night working in bed. So a laptop for me is really conducive to that work style. But I Know some traders who like to have a trading desktop that they leave obviously in one room and when they're done trading, they close the door that room and they don't go back to that computer for the rest of the day because they don't want the temptation of getting back into a trade. let's say in the afternoon or after hours or something like that.

So there may be a sort of practical application for having a desktop, but for me, having a laptop has always been more convenient then of course. What's really nice is that because it's a laptop, it's portable. I now have the basis for a traveling set up and my traveling setup right now is basically the same as a simple set up. It's my laptop plus two external USB monitors.

So when it comes to the external USB monitors, I Really like these ones. these are made by a Zeus again, not a product endorsement here. Not getting paid to say that these are just the ones that I happen to like I like them because number one, they're super skinny so they fit in my carry-on bag, number two they weigh almost nothing and number three, they're 1080 and number four. All I need to plug them in to make them work is the USB cord I don't need to plug it into an additional power source I don't need to get a special video adapter or video card and I could plug in four of these into one computer.

Now, the only thing stopping me from plugging in four of them for, from a practical standpoint, is the fact that my USB my computer only has two USB ports. so if I wanted to plug in four of these, I would have to get a USB hub which is basically like an extension cord for USB You plug one into the USB of your computer and it'll give you it'll turn one port into like four ports or into six ports and then you can plug all the additional monitors into there. So anyways, with these USB monitors, I got them on Amazon for around one hundred and fifty dollars each. The 1080 is a little more expensive than the 720 resolution, but I really recommend the 1080 because it just seems like the right size, the right resolution for this size monitor, and it's about a 15 inch monitor.

which really is. or maybe it's 13-inch but it's really just about the same size as my laptop I Think it's 15 inch and it's really just for me. a perfect fit. Now once you have this set up, the actual monitor comes with its own little case that also serves as the monitor stand so you don't have to lean it up against books or whatever although you could if you wanted to.

So all you have to do to power is plug them into your USB drives or USB ports and when you plug it in, your computer will automatically try to download a driver for the monitor. I've had a problem a couple of times where I plug these in and they're just blank. Nothing is happening at all. So I want to walk you through what to do if that happens to you because I think it's a fairly common problem.

So the first thing to do is down in your search bar. you can type in display settings and then you'll see the option to change display settings and you click on that option. Now as you can see here for me, it's showing these two external monitors and of course the main monitor of my laptop and you know what? That's the fourth or fifth reason I Like using a laptop because the laptop comes with a monitor so I already have one and now I just add two more which gives me three monitors total which is cheaper than having to buy three external monitors which is what I would need to do if I was using a desktop. So anyways, and with the display settings, you can click the detect button and if it says didn't detect another display even though you have one plugged in and simply not recognizing it, it means that there's obviously a little bit of a problem.

So the next step is to type in device manager and you open this up and this is kind of cool because what you can do is you can see basically if the driver is working for these USB monitors. So what you can do is you can click on display adapters right here and this drops down and it shows me that I have these two installed now. The last time I was having a problem with this, one of the monitors was working and the other was not working. It was showing up somewhere down here I can't remember if it was where it was, but it was showing up in one of these tabs down here other devices or something like that I had to tell it to I had to right-click and tell it to disable the driver or disable the device and then once I disabled it from there and I unplugged it and plugged it back in.

It reappeared in the right place up here. So a little bit of a quirk. I'm not exactly sure why that happened. You can Also, if you do run into this issue where neither of them are working, you can try to manually download the driver and the way you do that is you just look on the back of the monitor and it says the model number.

So this is Mb 169 B+ So I google Mb 169 B+ drivers and Boom! It pulls up the easiest website where I can download the drivers, install them, restart the computer and that usually gets things up and running. So getting these set up is is usually fairly easy. You shouldn't have to go through all this, it should just be as simple as you plug it in, it recognizes it and then you just choose where to place it. Now one of the things you will need to remember to do is for multiple displays.

choose to extend desktop to this display. If you choose to duplicate the desktop, then all you're doing is mirroring your current desktop on a second monitor. That's kind of like if you went into you know any Radio Shack or Circuit City. You'd see how every TV was playing the same station that's mirroring and that's obviously not going to help us for our trading, so we instead want to extend the desktop to these displays.

Now you could change the orientation to portrait I Know some people have I've seen some trading stations where people have their trading stations set up like this and you know that's cool if that works for you. but that doesn't work for me. So I don't do that I just have it set up as landscape recommendation is 1080. That's what it should show for you.

This shows one hundred and fifty percent. I don't know maybe I could change it to a hundred? I'm not exactly sure what that does, but it says recommended as 150 so I'll just leave it at that for right now. All right and then if you want to change the placement of these, you had to switch them from that side to that side. You could do that and then just click apply and it would be done.

And that's really as simple as it is. I mean like I said, you might have an issue with the drivers, but if you've never installed I think the issue that I had was that I had an older version of these USB monitors before I install the new one and it didn't delete the old driver. so it kind of caused some issues until I cleaned things up. So if you've never used one before, you should be able to just plug it in and you know be be running now that you have your computer and you've got your monitors.

And remember, the only cables we needed came with the monitors, so we didn't need to buy any special cables. So if you're gonna use this setup for traveling, all you need really is each monitor, each case, each USB cable that it comes with your laptop and the power cord and that's it. So you're really in good shape there now. I personally use Wi-Fi a lot when I'm trading and I know some people say you should always be hardwired.

You should always be hardwired. you know I try to be hardwired as much as I can when I'm at home, but sometimes because I come down from the bedroom with my laptop I forget to plug in the ethernet cord and so I just end up trading on Wi-Fi and it's not a problem when I'm at hotels. I trade on Wi-Fi and it's not a problem. What's always good to know is that you can turn your phone into a mobile hotspot.

so in order to do that I'll just show you guys real quick. you go into you go into your settings tab I don't know if this will zoom in, but you go into your settings tab and then you scroll down to personal hotspot so you click on that and then you just check on you select a password and then your computer's Wi-Fi signal will find this network that you just created and you can connect to the internet using your phone. I like to have that as a backup always knowing I can do that if I'm trading on hotel Wi-Fi I'm trading in a cafe. You know anything like that I know that I always have this as a backup as long as I have DS cell service.

Alright, so make sure you remember that because that is a really helpful thing to have now when it comes to setting up your layout. what I like to do is I like to have my broker screen dead center and that's because you know I've got my hands on my hotkeys and so I want to be able to look straight ahead when I'm trading. So I've got my broker right here on the main screen and I put the charts on the left side and the right side. Some people like to have their charts on the same monitor but and you could do that for one.

You know, because you could probably have room to fit one right on the side. But for me I just have this main screen as my level two windows and my open position windows. and even if I was trading like you know on on coinbase or something like that, I would be on G Dax I would for crypto currencies I would have the level twos right in the middle I would have the charts over on the side like this is just the way I like to trade. doesn't matter what you're trading so I'll put this chart over on this side over here I've got this chart over on that side.

So I've got my charts and basically what I do is I set it up so each monitor will show me two stocks. So if I bring this one back over here, you guys can just see again. So that monitor is showing two stocks. We've got this one on the left and this one on the right showing the one minute time frame, five minute time frame and the daily.

and that for me gives me a good picture. So that means with my traveling setup I can really only watch like three or maybe four stocks at once I can't watch, you know six or seven. but that's okay because each morning I usually narrow it down to like two stocks that I really like so it's not a problem. Now the last thing I need to make room for are my stock scanners and you can see a couple in the background here.

so I can lay those on this main screen I can even close out a couple windows I'm not using or I could tuck them over on the side of this screen and just make the char. it's a little bit tighter, which is fine when you have a simple trading station. You, you know kind of make the best of the space. but you know.

what's interesting is that at a certain point you know I've got six external monitors turned up turned on while they're off right now. but you know set up right here and you know it can I really watch every single chart that's on there once and the answer is probably no and what if I set up another six right here and so I have 12 monitors at certain point you you reach diminishing returns and it just doesn't make sense to keep adding more and more and more monitors. So I'm definitely a big fan of keeping it simple when it comes to my traveling setup. It's very simple I actually do bring a second computer with me and I bring that with me because I need to stream to the chatroom, you know? So this whole setup that I have here is, it's obviously pretty elaborate, but a lot of that is because of what I'm doing in the chatroom being able to broadcast my audio broadcast my screen share.

And if you're not doing all of those things, you don't need all of this equipment. So definitely a big fan of keeping it simple and you know I also kind of like symmetry. so you know I sort of like to have whatever I am using to be the same models. you know this just sort of the same layout.

It just kind of works for me. so you know different people are different with that kind of thing. and I know when I was started trading it was a Mitch mishmash of you know, different monitors of different sizes and some were matte screen and some were gloss and it's because I was on the budget. You know I would buy whatever was on sale and that's fine, you know I have.

There's nothing wrong with doing that, but for me, the way I have it now I like to sort of have things uniform and it helps me feel like I'm a little bit more organized. all right. So I hope this has been a good walkthrough of setting up your basic, very simple trading station. In some upcoming videos, we're going to talk about setting up more of a intermediate trading station and I need to do a walk through everything that I'm using for you guys because I know some of you will find it interesting and some of you may decide to use equipment which is totally cool.

So if you guys have any questions at all, post them below. I'll come back through I'll answer any of those questions I Want to help you guys get up and running with your trading station, so let me know if you have questions and we'll get them answered if you're still watching. You must have really enjoyed that video. so why not subscribe and get email alerts anytime? I upload new content.

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