Is Your Futures Trading Setup Ready for 24/7 Trading?

As futures markets stay open longer, I’ve been thinking about how well a typical home trading setup holds up. A computer and stable internet are fine when you’re at the desk for a few hours, but that changes when your platform has to keep running while you’re asleep, at work, or out of the house.

A lot can go wrong without you noticing right away: the internet drops, the router reboots, Windows installs an update, the power flickers, or the trading platform loses its connection to the broker. That’s where the gap between having a trading platform and having something that can stay online all the time starts to matter.

One useful point from a recent breakdown of 24/7 futures setups was the difference between server uptime and actual trading uptime. A VPS can still be online while the platform is frozen, disconnected, or no longer getting market data. The article also covers monitoring, server location, updates, security, and what to do when something breaks.

If you’re running futures platforms or automated strategies outside normal hours, what does your setup look like? Do you use a VPS, keep everything on your own computer, or mix the two? And if you’ve had a technical failure while you weren’t watching, what happened?