Troll answer: My trading setup is a 13" Macbook Air, which I use on my couch in front of
Weeds or
Orange is the New Black. Buy and hold; buy and hold.
Serious answer: Back when I used to do this professionally, it was two dual-CPU HP xw8000 workstations, with four 19" monitors on each, plus one extra monitor for one of my broker platforms that came with its own thin-client terminal.
anyone where got the professional bloomberg or reuters at home?
Dunno about Reuters Eikon, but Bloomberg is somewhere on the order of $2200 USD a month plus market data fees. I'm fairly sure they won't lease it to individual traders, either: only corporations can get it.
Update: aha, so I found the answer to this.
Eikon starts at $300/mo plus market data (and presumably newsfeeds and such as well). Also
they will give you a free trial, whereas if you asked Bloomberg for a free trial they would probably be all "ahahahahah no".
Still, here's the thing:
nobody serious uses Eikon. The previous Reuters platform - called
3000 Xtra - was reasonably popular, especially in FX and commodities where Bloomberg had never traditionally been popular. But sometime around the late 2000s, everyone started moving from Reuters to Bloomberg and nobody moved back. When I started in the biz I had a Reuters screen and no Bloomberg; when I left I had a Bloomberg screen and no Reuters.
Everybody these days uses Bloomberg.