Jitter hurts more than bandwidth ever will

[Amanhasnoname]

A fast connection and a good connection aren't the same thing. For a scalper, the number that matters is how consistent the delay is, not how many megabits come down the pipe.

Jitter is the variation in latency from one packet to the next. A line that delivers 20 milliseconds most of the time and 400 milliseconds every so often is worse for trading than a steady 60. The occasional spike is exactly what turns a good entry into a late one.

Home connections suffer from it more than most people realise. Streaming in the next room, a neighbour's usage on shared cable lines, and background updates all add variability.

Testing is easy. Run a continuous ping to the broker's server for an hour and look at the maximum and the spread of values, not just the average. Many tools plot it over time.

If spikes show up regularly, changing the router, using a wired link or moving to a VPS usually helps far more than upgrading the plan.

Router quality matters here too. Consumer routers running for months without a restart sometimes develop memory problems that show up as periodic lag, and a scheduled reboot during a quiet hour has fixed more than a few mystery slowdowns.

What does your ping graph look like over an hour?