Fintech company MetaQuotes conducted research focused on traders using virtual servers for automated trading. The analysis covered MetaTrader VPS users.
One of the key findings of the survey concerns the network latency between the virtual machine and the broker server: 86% of traders prefer to work with extremely low latencies, not exceeding 4ms. This preference can be easily explained, as high speed ensures predictable and stable operation of algorithms running on virtual machines. This minimizes the chance of price changes occurring before the order reaches the server.
Another part of the study regarding VPS purposes reveals that trading robots are more than seven times more popular than trading signal subscriptions. Thus, 86% of users run automated systems on virtual machines and only 12% use hosting for signal replication.
The results also show the geographical distribution of the most popular trading servers: 75% of them are located in just three countries (US, UK and Netherlands).
Additionally, a curious revelation was made regarding the geographical statistics of merchants using VPS: the top 3 countries (USA, Brazil and South Africa) are located on different continents.