On July 19, 2019, Capital One announced that unauthorized access of its systems had exposed personal information about both account applicants and card holders. If your data was among the stolen files, it’s not hard to imagine losing your trading business to identity theft.
Today we’ll look at what we know about the hack: how it happened and what was stolen. Then we’ll review how you can get prepared for the next time. (And there will be a next time.)
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These days, there is an app for practically anything you want to do. Maybe even multiple apps. Problem is, sometimes we get so used to doing something a certain way we don’t think to look around for a better way. This can be especially true for traders who tend to focus exclusively on the markets all day long.
In this post, I want to show you a few apps with the potential to improve your productivity as a trader. Maybe they’ll make a big difference to your workflow; maybe not. But it’s good to pick your head up and look around every so often, just to see what’s out there.
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Although I spend a lot of time talking about cutting-edge computer technology, I haven’t discussed voice technology that much, except for a couple of articles about getting help with general tasks.While Cortana or Google Assistant installed on your laptop trading computer can help find a restaurant in a new town, they haven’t been of much […]
Although it’s not a trader’s favorite thing to do, every so often you’re going to have to take an update to Windows 10. Microsoft is always updating its software products to add new features, improve current capabilities, and prevent security breaches.
The security updates, particularly, are super-important for traders. And the major updates are fairly unavoidable because of the way Microsoft has things set up.
For Windows 10, Microsoft generally releases two updates a year. As of this writing, the last major update for Windows 10 (version 1903) was in May 2019.
In this post, I’ll take a look at the current update process, along with the features of the 1903 version most likely to be interesting to traders.
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Keeping your trading computer secure is a frequent topic of mine, and for good reason. For traders, having your trading desktop or laptop hacked isn’t just inconvenient. It can cause a major financial loss.
One security best practice that’s not often mentioned has to do with the account you use on your trading computer. If you’re the only one on that computer, it’s easy to forget that multiple accounts are even an option.
It’s easy to fall into to the mindset of one user/one account. It’s just quicker to get ready for trading each morning if you don’t have to specify which user account you want.
However, it’s a bad idea to use an administrator account for daily tasks on your trading computer.
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In a previous post, I highlighted 7 Chrome extensions that can make your trading day easier and more productive. But plenty of traders aren’t using the Chrome browser. So this time, we’ll look at a similar list of productivity enhancers (add-ons) for the Mozilla Firefox browser.
Firefox is a great browser for your day-to-day online trading. Choosing between Chrome and Firefox is often a matter of which one feels better to you. But it can also become a matter of which add-ons are available to make your work easier.
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We can all use a little help getting through our busy trading days. Plenty of free apps are now available to do just that. Many of them are extensions to the Chrome browser favored by most traders.
In fact, so many browser extensions are available it’s hard to pick out the ones that offer the most benefit to traders. The Chrome Store has thousands of extensions in categories like productivity, accessibility, communications, and more.
Today we spotlight a few of the apps most likely to be valuable to you as a trader. I think you’ll find at least one thing here to level up your trading day productivity.
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If you’ve worked for a big company any time recently, and wanted to connect to the company’s computer system from home, you probably had to make that connection via a VPN (Virtual Private Network).
If you thought the purpose of the VPN was to make the company’s network extra-secure, you’d be right. But if you thought VPNs were just for big companies, you’d be wrong.
VPNs are now offered as a paid service to anyone needing the extra level of security they provide. As a trader, this could be you. Especially if you would like to be able to trade securely while sipping your morning latte at Starbucks.
In this post, I’ll give you a high-level overview of what VPNs are all about, and why they could be important to your trading business. Plus I’ve linked to a few articles that will give you even more information in case you decide you need to get on the VPN bandwagon.
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Most traders have tried incognito mode (aka private browsing) on their trading computer at some time. It sounds neat and makes you feel protected. But just how protected are you?
Like so many things on the web, there are some widely held misconceptions about private browsing. It’s a good idea to understand when incognito/private browsing can be useful for your trading business and when it’s not.
Keep reading so you’ll be able to make better decisions about when to go incognito in the future.
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For years now, many of us in the trading community have relied on Dropbox to make it easy to share files. Dropbox was one of the early pioneers in file sharing, and it’s still popular among the trading community.
Larger trading businesses routinely share lots of data files and screenshots with both internal and external users. But even if you’re just trading out of a home office, there are likely to be times when you want to, say, share your trading analysis spreadsheet with a family member.
If you’ve just been sticking with Dropbox for your file sharing, you might not be aware of some newer solutions that are as good as or better than Dropbox.
Here are some alternative file sharing solutions you may want to try for your trading business. Interestingly, some of these alternatives can be used on the fly. I.e., you don’t even need to sign up for an account.
One of these may be just perfect for your needs.
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