About Us | EZ Trading Computers

My name is Eddie Z. I'm a full-time day trader, and I build computers for traders. Only for traders.

Thirty-nine years on Wall Street. More than 20,000 machines built since 2010. Every one of them designed around what actually happens to a computer at 9:30 in the morning, because I have my own money on the line at 9:30 in the morning.

Almost everyone else in this business arrived from the technology side and then discovered traders. I came the other way around, and I got tired of watching traders like me get sold the wrong machine at a ridiculous price by somebody who has never placed a trade in their life.

Not sure whether the computer you already own is holding you back? Run my free CPU benchmark test. It takes about a minute and gives you a real number to work with.

“As a trader, I know little about computers and don't want to put the time in to learn all about them to get a trading set-up that WORKS. Eddie Z knew exactly what I needed because he is a trader too!”Corky, FLVerified customer

“This last computer I bought from you was my eighth trading computer… you always answer your phone yourself, amazing in today's world.”Robert, NJVerified customer

“There are three reasons I went back to EZ Trading Computers. One, they provided me with a lot of information. Two, they have great customer service, and three, most importantly, their computers are amazing and they last forever.”Akil StokesHead Trading Coach, Tier One Trading

And if you want to know exactly who you're dealing with, here is the whole story.

Introduced to Trading at a Young Age

My fascination with markets began in the mid-1970s, when I was seven years old. My dad was a commodity futures trader on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange, and he would take me to work with him. I still remember standing there watching a crowd of grown men huddled in a ring, shouting and waving their arms at each other. It was electric. Even as a little kid I could feel the energy coming off that place.

As I got older, my dad taught me to draw point-and-figure charts by hand, with a pencil and graph paper. He would show me the formations and explain how he used them to work out where price was headed, which is how he fed our family. My friends' dads had normal jobs. Mine read the future off a sheet of graph paper, and I thought that was the coolest thing I had ever heard of.

It took me years to understand what I had actually been watching. My dad, standing in a pit and hand-charting every night, was one of the earliest day traders, working that way decades before online trading gave it a name. A true old-school original!

How I Got Into Computers

The other half of this story starts in 1980, when I was 11 and a friend of mine got an Apple II. I had never seen anything like it, and from that afternoon I was hooked on computers. Shortly after, I got my own first machine, a Commodore VIC-20. It was so much slower than my friend's Apple that I took the thing apart to find out what was wrong with it.

What I found was 5 kilobytes of memory. Five! Today your coffee maker has more than that.

That was the first time I ever opened up a machine to figure out why it wasn't fast enough for what I wanted to do with it, and it would not be the last. It turned into a lifelong hobby, passion, and, if I'm being honest, an obsession.

Wall Street, 1987

I took my first full-time job on Wall Street in 1987, right after I graduated high school. I worked the floor of the NYMEX, the same exchange where my dad traded, and one of my main responsibilities was keeping the brokers' charts updated by hand. It was the exact skill my dad had taught me at the kitchen table, except now somebody was paying me for it. A few years later computerized charting services arrived and that art was lost forever.

I kept working that floor every summer, Christmas break and spring break the whole way through college and graduate school.

One day down there I will never forget. It was January 15th, 1991, and I was clerking for a trader in the crude oil pit. Tariq Aziz, a key figure in Saddam Hussein's regime, walked out of a meeting with U.S. diplomats at the United Nations. The deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait had passed, and when no deal was announced, crude oil went from around $27 to over $40 a barrel in two minutes. Two minutes! A move like that was unheard of at the time. The pit went absolutely crazy, and the trader I was clerking for made over $100,000 that afternoon. It is a number I have never forgotten.

That was the day I learned that in this business, being fast is not a nice extra. When a market moves like that, the person whose tools keep up gets paid and the person whose tools stall does not.

Hard Lessons as a Stockbroker

After graduate school, in the early 1990s, I became a stockbroker. I'll be straight with you about that decade: picking stocks was easy in a way that made a lot of us look far smarter than we actually were. The internet was brand new, money was pouring into anything connected to it, and a rising market covered up a great many bad decisions.

As the decade wore on and tech stocks rocketed into the stratosphere, it got close to ridiculous. I would buy something with "dot com" in the name at 9:45 in the morning and sell it up 20% by three o'clock that same afternoon. My daily commissions grew bigger than what I used to earn in a month. The phone would not stop ringing, referrals poured in, and people were taking cash advances on their credit cards to buy stocks. It felt too good to be true, and it was.

When the dot-com bubble finally burst in March 2000, I happened to be on my honeymoon in Hawaii. I had moved every one of my clients into cash before I left, and I would love to tell you that was genius market timing. It wasn't. I just didn't want to be babysitting accounts on my honeymoon.

Then I came home, decided the correction was finished, and put all of those clients back into the market. Big mistake! That was not a correction, it was the start of a crash, and over the next year I fought that market and lost, over and over. Some of my clients were down as much as 80%.

I had an MBA and I clearly did not understand market cycles at all. So I went to the library, and yes, we still used libraries back then, and started reading every book on the stock market I could get my hands on.

Two Free Guides Before You Buy

Before I get to the computer half of my story, here is the shortcut. I have put everything I know about buying a trading machine into two free guides, so that you can walk into this understanding what actually matters and what is just marketing.

The Complete Guide to Trading Computers — for desktops and multi-monitor setups. It is the guide I wish somebody had handed me back in 1995.

The Complete Guide to Laptops for Traders — for trading on the move, or if you want one machine that can do both jobs.

Both are free. Between them they will save you from the mistake I watch traders make every week, which is paying for the wrong parts entirely and still ending up with a machine that stalls when the market opens.

“A fellow trader sent me to EZ Trading Computer's website. On there I used their testing software and found that my computer was not at all ideal… I gained a ton of information from that guide. I made upgrades to my system based on the information, and it was like night and day.”Becky GaskellMarket Mamas

The Book That Saved My Business

So, back to that library. I had just lost a great deal of money for a lot of people who trusted me, and I was working my way through every book on the stock market I could get my hands on, trying to understand what I had missed.

I read dozens of them that year, but the one that stood out was How to Make Money in Stocks by William O'Neil. Nobody explained the market's wild movements better than O'Neil did. His book was packed with research and hard facts, and the cornerstone of his whole system was charts. Charts!!! The same thing my dad had taught me on graph paper thirty years earlier. As soon as I started reading, I knew exactly what I had to do.

I got my clients back out of the market, saved my business, and spent the next twenty years refining O'Neil's approach into a method of my own. That method is what EZBreakouts is about, if that side of things interests you. Ninety-five percent of the brokers I knew back then are no longer in this business.

Why I Started Building Trading Computers

Now let me pick the computer half of the story back up, because this is where my two obsessions, markets and machines, finally came together.

In 1995, while I was still a broker, I built myself the first multiple-monitor trading computer I had ever seen anyone use. Back then a second screen was almost unheard of on a trading desk, and my colleagues were definitely jealous!

And I never stopped building. Over the roughly thirty years since, I have put together and tested hundreds of different configurations, working out which parts actually hold up under a live market open and which ones only look impressive on a spec sheet. But understand, that was a trader building machines for himself and for trading buddies who wanted what I had. For most of those years it never once occurred to me that it could be a business.

Then in 2010 a friend told me to Google "trading computers."

I nearly fell off my chair. The companies selling to traders were charging two and three times what the parts inside those machines were worth, and they were charging it to people who had no way of knowing any better. Traders are experts on markets. Most of us are not experts on hardware, and that industry had absolutely noticed.

As a trader myself, it makes me queasy to watch anyone take advantage of that gap in knowledge. So 2010 is the year my hobby became my job, and it is the year EZ Trading Computers started.

What We Do Today

Part of my mission is to represent us traders in the world of trading technology, so that we don't get ripped off. Here is what that looks like in practice.

We only build for traders. Not gamers, not video editors, not offices. Every decision in these machines is made for sustained load during a market open, and that is a completely different problem from anything else a computer gets asked to do.
More than 20,000 machines built since 2010. Sixteen years of doing nothing else.
Lifetime technical support from people who understand what a missed fill actually costs you, not a script reader who wants you to reinstall Windows.
Fair pricing, explained. You will always know what is inside your machine and why it is there.

Where to Start

Run my free CPU benchmark test. One minute, and you will know whether the machine you already own is fast enough or quietly costing you money.

Get the free Complete Guide to Trading Computers. Everything that actually matters before you spend a dime. There is a laptop edition too.

Not sure which machine you need? Call us on 800-387-5250, 9:30am to 5:30pm Eastern. You will get a trading computer specialist who knows this hardware inside out. Tell them what you trade and what you run, and they will tell you straight which machine fits, including when the less expensive one is the right answer. Nobody here will sell you more computer than you need.

See what is on sale right now. When you already know what you want.

I sincerely wish you success in all your trading endeavors.

May the trend be with you!

"Eddie Z"

(Eddie Z is how I'm known in the trading computer world. My real name is Russ Hazelcorn.)

Professional Career Timeline

1987–1994 — Worked the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange as a clerk every summer, Christmas and spring break while at school. Graduated from Penn State with a degree in Accounting, followed by an MBA from Lehigh University.
1994–2010 — Stockbroker for several NYSE member firms. Won the "Top Gun" Broker award in the Fort Lauderdale office of Janney Montgomery Scott for the year 2000. In 2003 opened an independent trading office and moved from trading other people's money to trading my own.
1995 — Built my first multiple-monitor trading computer, for myself. Have been building and testing configurations ever since.
1998–present — Trading electronically, full time.
2010–present — Launched EZ Trading Computers after that Google search, to bring real value to traders across every market. Also launched EZBreakouts.com to share my trading knowledge and experience.