Since I started day trading after taking a trip to see TraderMike last summer, I knew it was going to be a little easier with more than one monitor. The video card that I happened to have in the computer I built supported dual monitors, so I hooked another monitor up and have used a two monitor setup (one 19 inch and one 17 inch) for several months.

Read on for more about my current trading computer config.

Here is a picture of my dual monitor setup (click to view larger image):

Of course, this was a lot better than a single monitor but I could easily use more screen real estate if I had it. After Ugly tried a free software product called VirtuaWin to create virtual desktops, I gave that a spin.

VirtuaWin allows you to have up to 8 virtual desktops that you can switch between giving you a lot of screen real estate, but only showing you what your monitors can display at any given time. I set up 4 virtual desktops. One the first desktop I have my main applications up: CyberTrader, Trade-Ideas, and any other everyday applications that I use, like Firefox.

On the remaining 3 desktops, I filled them with candlestick charts using eSignal’s window popout feature, which allows each chart window to appear on the taskbar and can therefore be dragged around and treated as a separate window instead of living inside the main eSignal application window. I was able to comfortably fit 8 charts on each desktop (4 on each monitor). The first chart desktop is dedicated to long setups, the second chart desktop is dedicated to short setups, and the third is dedicated to “spillover” – if there are more long or short setups than would fit on their respective desktop, the extras would go here. Here is what my “short desktop” looks like today:

There were a few things I did to configure VirtuaWin to my liking. These two steps make it infinitely more usable in my opinion. By default, VirtuaWin switches to another desktop when your mouse touches the edge of your screen. I would quite often “accidentally” switch desktops with my mouse doing normal things like using the scrollbar on the edge of a window that happened to be close to the edge of the screen. This seems like pure chaos if you aren’t used to it, so I immediately enabled “key control” which only switches desktops with the mouse if you have the control key pressed. This improved the experience right away.

Next, I enabled hot key support which allows switching between virtual desktops with a key sequence, rather than always having to use the mouse to switch between desktops. With this enabled, I can just type “ALT+1″, “ALT+2″, “ALT+3″, and “ALT+4″ to toggle between each desktop.

One thing I discovered pretty quickly about using virtual desktops is this: have a plan for what windows you’ll be using in which desktop. If you just start throwing applications in another desktop with no rhyme or reason, you will waste time trying to find them when you need to access them.

I have been using this arrangement for several months and it has worked pretty well. In the absence of a bunch of monitors, VirtuaWin can really help you get the most out of the monitor(s) you do have. This setup is not without its own issues, though. I have recently upgraded to a new configuration which I will share in my next post.

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