Going to Try Using Parallels to Trade Remotely from my Macbook

[Jared R 10]

I am going to be in Europe for the next three weeks and am going to try to use Parallels on my Macbook to trade remotely.  I have read it may have lagging and other issues.  I will keep everyone updated on my experience and am open to any advice or alternative solutions for running Das on a Mac.  To start I will trade in Sim so nobody panic.

Edited July 16, 2019 by Jared R

[Jared R 10]

Day 1 running parallels in London was a huge success. No lag or issues on a 60 mbps connection and hit my daily profit target. 

 

Biggest downside today was it devoured my battery. Basically lost 1% of battery life per minute so I recommend being plugged in. 

[Lucy L 2]

I found that Parallels uses a lot of memory.  Running only Parallels and Win+DAS on my iMac would use up all 16G I have.

That being said I'm still full time on this setup every trading day and luckily rarely encounters situations where a lag is so serious that it affects my P/L. If my trading significantly improves and have been consistent for a few months, I would invest in Windows(PC) with my profits. Once you go Mac, it's really hard to go back. 🤣

[Jared R 10]

I was pretty scared to trade the first few days because I worried I would experience lag while I had a position. I’ve been pleasantly surprised and happy with the performance minus the battery consumption. I’m glad to hear you haven’t had any major issues too! 

It does take up a lot of memory but isn’t maxing out my 16G of RAM.

[wklodge 2]

On 7/23/2019 at 5:31 AM, Lucy L said:

I found that Parallels uses a lot of memory.  Running only Parallels and Win+DAS on my iMac would use up all 16G I have.

That being said I'm still full time on this setup every trading day and luckily rarely encounters situations where a lag is so serious that it affects my P/L. If my trading significantly improves and have been consistent for a few months, I would invest in Windows(PC) with my profits. Once you go Mac, it's really hard to go back. 🤣

 

On 7/16/2019 at 10:39 AM, Jared R said:

I am going to be in Europe for the next three weeks and am going to try to use Parallels on my Macbook to trade remotely.  I have read it may have lagging and other issues.  I will keep everyone updated on my experience and am open to any advice or alternative solutions for running Das on a Mac.  To start I will trade in Sim so nobody panic.

I sometimes use my MacBook Pro and 2 portable monitors to run TradeStation (a 32-bit program) when I travel. Not very often though b/c I'm not away for more than a day or so. Anyway, I started out with Parallels but ran into problems setting up multiple monitors (4) for use when I'm at home. So I switched to Bootcamp. I created a 100GB Bootcamp partition on the laptop SSD and found this solution to be better than Parallels. No lag b/c there's no emulation. Running Bootcamp is just like running on a Windows partition. Of course, you don't have access to any Mac funtionality while in Bootcamp, but I didn't find that to be a problem. The only problem I found was when I saved a backup on my Windows desktop machine and used that archive to update my Mac machine. Because of the differences in screen resolution, I'd have to modify the fonts on several of the screens. I like running hotkey/macros on the Mac keyboard better b/c of the short key throw.

[Jared R 10]

On 7/25/2019 at 7:47 AM, wklodge said:

 

I sometimes use my MacBook Pro and 2 portable monitors to run TradeStation (a 32-bit program) when I travel. Not very often though b/c I'm not away for more than a day or so. Anyway, I started out with Parallels but ran into problems setting up multiple monitors (4) for use when I'm at home. So I switched to Bootcamp. I created a 100GB Bootcamp partition on the laptop SSD and found this solution to be better than Parallels. No lag b/c there's no emulation. Running Bootcamp is just like running on a Windows partition. Of course, you don't have access to any Mac funtionality while in Bootcamp, but I didn't find that to be a problem. The only problem I found was when I saved a backup on my Windows desktop machine and used that archive to update my Mac machine. Because of the differences in screen resolution, I'd have to modify the fonts on several of the screens. I like running hotkey/macros on the Mac keyboard better b/c of the short key throw.

I didn't travel with any additional monitors--I'm guessing that is why I didn't run into any problems.  I have no problem with losing Mac functionality.  Even with Parallels I didn't switch back and forth between them while trading.  If I get multiple monitors before my next travels I will definitely check out Bootcamp.  Thanks for the feedback!