Bill Braman, 40
Commodity futures trader, Chicago Board of Trade
It can be pretty inconvenient to reposition and locate the proper windows on your computer screen. It also takes time.
And for Chicagoan Bill Braman, time is most certainly money.
Just 15 seconds spent minimizing, maximizing and resizing desktop elements easily could cost Braman $4,000.
Every second counts for the 40-year-old futures trader at the Chicago Board of Trade. In trading, critical information must be available at all times.
That’s easy at his office at the Board of Trade, where Braman has two Dell desktop computers hooked up to nine flat-screen monitors (using two Matrox G200 Multi-Monitor video cards with four monitor ports each; www.matrox.com).
“When the market is moving, there’s no time to find your mouse and move your windows around,” he said. “I can’t miss a trade because I’m moving screens around.”
So last summer, when the Bramans decided to go to Cape Cod with their four children for six weeks, the self-employed trader set off to find technology that would let him keep working. (“I don’t make money if I don’t work.”)
“And with laptops, you can’t hook up more than one monitor,” Braman said. “You can hook up one monitor that displays exactly what’s on the laptop screen.”
So Braman hit the Internet and found a product called SideCar Plus Four Pro, manufactured by Atlanta-based Digital Tigers Inc. (www.digitaltigers .com). The $2,000 product let him connect four additional monitors to his laptop.
The small black device features four monitor ports and plugs into his laptop via a PC Card.
A SideCar Plus Two model (which allows two additional screens) also is available for about $1,500.
With the device Braman had a five-display machine. He lugged it to a Cape Cod Internet cafe where he rented space and two T1 high-speed Internet lines last summer.
It worked like a charm.
“Trading there over the Internet is as good as sitting here in the office trading.”
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Braman also uses the Internet as a critical research tool.
He frequents a site maintained by New Jersey-based Mizuho Securities USA Inc. (www.fujisec.com) to read market commentaries and learn when various market indicators are being released.
“But the most important Web site I use is called www.time .gov,” he said. “It has the official time of day,” which he needs to follow the government’s release of economic indicators.
“They can invent these great computers, but they can’t figure out how to make a computer clock run properly. Everyone watches time.gov.”
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