I've worked in the electronic trading aka hft market now almost 7 years. The big boys are optimizing their trades down to the nanoseconds, they are spending big

I've worked in the electronic trading aka hft market now almost 7 years. The big boys are optimizing their trades down to the nanoseconds, they are spending big money on bleeding edge network technologies, colocating their servers inside exchanges, etc. If you expect to compete with them on AWS save yourself the loss and just stop right there. However, if your strategy is more or less buy and hold for weeks / months then this doesn't sound entirely unreasonable. From my experience, simply getting into this industry as a serious player is roughly a 10-12 million investment, and that is starting very very small in only a few exchanges.