Day Trading

If you bought after hours then it would be the price the stock opens the next day. Also the same thing about being sold.

You want to buy a diversified portfolio of stocks, as individual stocks are too risky. With a few thousand dollars, this means buying mutual funds. I like Vanguard.com, other people like Fidelity, TIAA-CREF, and DFA. Buy no-load, low cost funds. If you are like most people you will invest part of your money conservatively, in money market funds and bond funds, and part aggressively in stock funds. Vanguard.com has an on-line questionnaire which will give you an idea how aggressive you want to be.

Investing in a mutual fund IRA for retirement may give you an income tax break. Talk to your tax adviser. You may also be able to invest in a stock mutual fund via a 401K plan at work.

Believing advice you get on Yahoo answers can be risky, so read these websites for further information. If you find it too confusing, contact a professional financial advisor. They will charge you significant commissions, however.

There are very few, if any sites that will provide you with average annual price. However, Yahoo finance has the information you need to calculate that price. Go to Yahoo finance and enter the symbol for the stock in question. When the data for that stock displays on the screen, on the left hand side of the page near the top you will find "historical prices". Click on that. Enter the start date and the end date i e 1/1/2005 and 12/31/2005 and press enter. That will bring up the daily stock prices for the stock in question. Next down load them to a spread sheet. At the bottom of the page you will see "Download to spreadsheet". Click on that. Once you have the prices in the spread sheet, you can calculate the average price for the year. Sum the closing prices x the volume figure for each day and put that figure in a new column. Then sum the that column down the page and sum the volumn figure down the page. Then divide the sum of price x volume by sum of volumns. That will give you the average price for the year or rather close enough. Also Yahoo finance has the has the current market value, and book value and current price. You can get the year end figures by going to the SEC filings. On the left side of the page again but further down, and when you get there displaying the 10k for the company. It will have the book value. Divide the tangible assets by the number of shares outstanding. The market value is the price of the stock x the number of shares outstanding.

You can contact the company's investor relations rep and request a prospectus. Or, simply go to Yahoo Finance or Hoovers.com.

Only the number of shares and price per trade– and even then you would have to have a fairly high level service. An investor does not have the right to another investor's trading data or to infringe their confidentiality or privacy. This information is not generally known unless the particular buyer or seller is an insider (an officer, director, or large proportionate shareholder). Ownership amounts of over 5% must be reported. Insider trading data can be found on Edgar online or Yahoo Finance (just enter a symbol and look under insider).

First, if you are a long term investor, you were willing to pay 1.20 according to your limit and you got filled at 1.16 so it's a good fill according to your instructions. Long term, 4 cents isn't going to make much difference.

Second, if you consider yourself a "trader" a lot of weird things happen in the pushing and shoving of the open. The specialists on the floor make a huge amount of money at this time. In this case, it wouldn't surprise me if the specialist/market maker first did a bunch of buying of opening orders (ONT opened at 1.07) and then sold to the opening buy orders at 1.16 (ONT jumped to 1.16 right after the opening) thus making 0.09 per share just for being the specialist/market maker. He has no obligation to match the orders of public buyers with public sellers. It's good to be the market maker. Traders like me always wait to see how the stock opens to get confirmation before placing an order. A lot of things can happen in the news between 1AM and the market open. Traders never put in orders and let them sit that long.

Day-trading is not easy for a novice or part-time investor and in order to be done successfully you will need to put a lot of time into research and analysis of various market trends. Also, any good broker will advise you against trying to become a day-trader because of the potential losses and risks. I would personally leave day-trading to the professionals with a lot of capital and time. However, if you want to start investing successfully try to set the goals for the security that you choose as well as an appropriate exit strategy before you even make your purchase. Make sure that the goals you set include the amount of commission that you will pay to buy and sell the security. Also, and this is extremely important make sure that you purchase and sell with limit orders not market orders.

The site at

http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/reports/

keeps the biggest gainers/losers by exchange for the past five trading sessions.

There are thousands of books that will help. (You are going to lose money in the long run day trading) I would start with "One up on Wall St" by Peter Lynch. Its an easy read and simple concepts.

Muncie raises many good points. It may well be the market vs. limit order issue.

I don't know your level of expertise trading, but another possible issue is, even with a limit order, I do find that my Fidelity trades usually take longer than with my accounts with other brokers.

I think Fidelity does some simple stuff very well, but with more complex stuff, they're very far behind their competitors.

I've put through spread orders into Fidelity and other brokerages at the same time (giving Fidelity the first crack) and I've gotten filled on other brokerages before Fidelity, with the Fidelity order still sitting there. But it could just be me.

So if you are, or plan to do a lot of more complex spread or other trades, you might start looking elsewhere.

As Muncie says though, give them a call. Some of their folks can be helpful.