I recently read an interesting article about protecting yourself from loss in the event of a flash market crash. There were a few solid points in the article – including a stark statistic about stocks dropping 20% in seconds. Yikes.
There is always some sort of dark cloud of possibilities that could negatively affect your trading. Just like that article pointed out, your focus should be on protecting yourself from loss. This really got me thinking about how we use computers, and the little odd things that can happen to cause you to lose out on a trade – causing panic, distress, and distraction.
It shouldn’t take something as big and scary as a flash crash to get us to pay attention to things that might prevent us from executing trades profitably.
Here are just some of the things that could cause a profit loss:
- Loss of Internet connection
- Slow, sluggish computer unable to process real-time data
- Outdated market data
- Blackout or brownout power outage
Respectively, here is how you should protect yourself from these situations:
- Have a backup Internet connection.
- Don’t trade on an under-powered computer.
- Have a super-fast Internet connection and process installed in your computer.
- Utilize a battery backup.
Those are small things that could have big implications, should any of them happen to you.
Any of those things could cause a problem at a very inopportune time – during a trade or while you are monitoring the market.
And here’s another one…
Imagine a stock suddenly breaks into a new high and suddenly your computer goes to sleep. Probably, you’ve just been monitoring the market action, but hadn’t moved your mouse recently.
A few quick changes in your settings will prevent this scenario from ever happening to you. Even if you think this wouldn’t happen to you, you should take two minutes to make this change.
Watch this video to see how easy it is.
Prevent Your Computer From Going To Sleep Suddenly
Here are the steps:
- Right click anywhere on the desktop.
- Click the last item in the grey contextual menu, labeled Personalize
- Next go to the bottom right hand corner of this Control Panel\Appearances and Personalization window, and click on Screen Saver.
- A dialog box will appear.
- Next click on Change power settings in the lower left hand corner of this dialog box.
- Finally, look on the left side of the new Power Options window. Click Choose when to turn off the display.
- Change the settings for high performance and low performance. In this case, maybe you want to make sure that, for the most part, your computer never goes to sleep.
- You can also set here whether, after so many minutes, your computer goes to sleep, or you can just choose Never.
- Once you make those changes, be sure to click Save changes.
Now you no longer have to worry about how long it’s been since you moved your mouse. Your screen will stay on, and your computer will stay awake, for as long as you need to get you through your busy trading day.
There are more trading computer tips like this in our buyers guide. Check out our “How To Buy a Trading Computer” e-book.
We hope today’s Quick Tip helped you. If you found this helpful, you’ll want to check out the other computer how-to’s I’ve created on this page. You can always call us if you have questions: 800-387-5250