It is important to define the outcomes of your trading system. An outcome could be a research-based system that might be more concerned with obtaining high-quality data from data vendors, performing computations or running models, and evaluating a strategy through signal generation. Part of the research component might include a data-cleaning module or a backtesting interface to run a strategy with theoretical parameters over historical data. The CPU speed, memory size, and bandwidth are factors to be considered while designing our system.

Another outcome could be an execution-based system that is more concerned with risk management and order handling features to ensure timely execution of multiple orders. The system must be highly robust and handle any point of failure during the order execution. As such, network configuration, hardware, memory management and speed, and user experience are some factors to be considered when designing a system in executing orders.

A...