You bought a MacBook Pro and trade from it. Your EA runs locally. Everything works. Until it doesn't. Here's the math on why "I trade from my laptop" is usually false economy for serious traders.
The slippage tax
Average home internet adds 80-200ms of round-trip latency between your click and the broker matching engine. For a manual scalper or an EA placing 100 trades a month, that latency translates into slippage.
Conservative math: 100 trades/month × 0.8 pips avg slippage from latency × $10 per pip per standard lot = $80/month bleeding. That's already close to a Trader-tier Skyline VPS (€99/mo).
The sleep mode trap
You step away. Mac goes to sleep. Your EA stops firing. The market moves. You come back and find a trade entry you missed, or worse, an open trade that never got managed.
Settings can disable sleep, but caffeine apps and lid-closed-don't-sleep workarounds are unreliable. Eventually you'll forget.
The wifi flicker
Your router reboots. Your ISP has 30 seconds of packet loss. Your kid plays Fortnite and saturates your connection. Each of these can disconnect your MT5 from the broker mid-trade. EA-managed exits don't fire.
The funded account killer
Funded traders have it worst. Prop firms count slippage and overnight gaps in your drawdown. A few bad fills during NFP can push your account past max daily loss. You get the email: "Your funded account has been terminated."
One trader we know failed his FTMO challenge twice from home wifi disconnects. Third attempt on a €99/mo VPS, passed clean. He still trades on that VPS today, on a $200K funded account.
"But a VPS is €99/month"
Math:
- Average slippage savings: $80/mo on a 100-trade strategy
- Downtime savings: 1 missed trade per month = $50-200 on a small account
- Funded account survival: priceless
- Sleep at night without checking your laptop at 3am: also priceless
VPS pays for itself the first month for most active traders. By month 3, it's free + giving you back time.
When a laptop is actually fine
If you trade 1-2 swing positions per month with stop-losses set on the broker server (not EA-managed), a laptop is fine. If you only check positions once a day, a laptop is fine.
If you run any EA, scalp, or hold open trades while you sleep · get a VPS. Skyline or otherwise. Just stop bleeding money to home wifi.