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How would you like to replay stock or futures charts and market depth (level 2) of the trading day for your favorite stock or the e-mini S&P 500 (ES) or Nasdaq (NQ) futures contract during your free time? This is invaluable if you would like to fine-tune your timing in trade entries and exits and to review day-trades that you may have executed during regular trading hours (RTH). In other words, you could compile a live trading journal of your trading day for later review. You could even annotate the charts to capture your thought process and add an audio commentary at critical junctures in time. All this is possible with the current power of computers and screen capture software.
Best Software for Live Screen Capture
 The best software available currently for traders to achieve live screen recording/capture is undoubtedly Camtasia Studio from TechSmith. Camtasia utilizes its own proprietary compressor/decompressor (CODEC) called TSCC. The TSCC CODEC is lossless meaning it preserves 100% of the image quality, even through multiple decompression/recompression cycles that are typical during a video production process. It is therefore very efficient in producing highly compressed high definition avi video files that you can replay on Camtasia's own video player or your favorite other video player like Windows Media Player or WinAmp.
Camtasia offers the user various options in recording video quality like the ability to choose screen color depth and a suitable capture frame rate. Full motion video normally consists of 25 to 30 frames per second (fps). A typical Camtasia regular trading hours (RTH) capture at 25 fps of a 1280 x 1024 screen filled with live charts, time & sales data and level 2 market depth takes up only about 1.5 GB of hard drive space. The CPU load is also very impressive as it hardly uses above 20% of the CPU resources on a 2 GHz Pentium 4 machine. Although a 25 fps capture setting seems a bit on the overkill, it is certainly required if you want smooth motion for fast trading instruments like ES futures or daytrader's favorite stocks like KLAC or GOOG, where the time & sales (T&S) and market depth refresh very fast. If just capturing charts and a slow moving T&S is all that is required, then a capture setting of 5-10 fps should suffice. This will correspondingly greatly reduce the output avi video file.
Computer System Requirements
 Most modern PC's with at least a 2 GHz CPU will suffice. The computer main memory (RAM) has to be at least 512MB but it is advisable to go with 1 GB or more (read Trading Computer System RAM requirements for more info). You should also install a second hard drive of 80 GB capacity or larger, solely for the video files so that your primary hard drive, which contains your operating system, broker order-entry platform and trading charting software, is not adversely affected. Using one hard drive will still work but the strain on your primary hard disk will put your whole trading computer system at risk as now this hard drive has to work non-stop recording live video during the trading day.
After recording a certain number of trading sessions, it is a good idea to archive your video files using a DVD writer. CD writers can also be used but may not be ideal as the capacity of one CD is only about 700MB as compared to a DVD's capacity of 4.7 - 9 GB, depending on the type of media used.
Alternative Trading Day Playback Solutions
Some software vendors like NeoTicker and Ensign provide a playback capability where a trader can load data for a certain trading instrument and the software will automatically play it back at various speeds. NeoTicker has the capability to block the user's access to future data during playback so as to prevent "cheating" in case a trainee trader starts to look forward at the outcome immediately rather than following the flow of the trading day. Other trading software like eSignal have very basic playback implementations where they allow a trader to scroll through historical bars for a particular time period selected.
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