Broadband speed

[Ferru123]

Hi

Does the broadband speed have any meaningful effect on a trader's performance?

Thanks

Jeff

[Captain Sensible]

Guess it depends on how you define broadband speed , most broadband connections should easily be able to handle the amounts of data that BA downloads from and uploads to the Betfair API, so the figure you'd need to consider is your latency or ping speed between your computer to the Betfair servers in Ireland and back.

Obviously if you get the fresh data before everyone else you have the best chance of acting upon that data. But in reality so much depends on your approach to trading the markets as we'd be talking in terms of milliseconds. If you're manually trading your reaction times compared to others would be alot more of an issue when trying to decide to take a price and actually get it before someone else. If you're 'botting' the markets there's no getting away from the fact that people will pay for the fastest connections based in Ireland to give them an advantage on receiving the data first so unless you're propared to play that arms race it's wiser not to base your approach by being front of any queues.