Day Trading

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.

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.

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.

If you want to daytrade in the United States of America the answer is yes.

I do not know the laws in Canadian Stocks. You should consult a lawyer before you daytrade in Canada.

If you daytrade in the United States of America by Law you will get a Credit Line of at least $100,000.00 (This is called a margin account)

However, if you don't have assets of at least $75,000.00 (For example, a $25,000 car and a $50,000 property) that you can sell in case things go wrong I strongly suggest you NOT TO DAYTRADE ON MARGIN WITHOUT LIMITING YOUR LOSSES TO A MAXIMUM OF 25% (This means you will only lose your original $25,000)

If you want I can email the Daytrading Laws.

Do not listen to cgimwei.
You need at least $500 to open a brokerage account in Scottrade.com

Example 1:
You cannot invest all your money in just one company. Therefore we are going to invest $225 in each company.
You buy 10 shares for $225 in Wal-Mart
You buy 10 shares for $225 in Target

Let's say you got lucky and both stocks actually went up 5% that day.

Your stocks are now worth $236.25 ($11.25 Profit)

However, you already paid $7 when you bought them and you need to pay another $7 when you sell them

Therefore in this example you actualy lose money.

You also need to consider you have to pay taxes on your capital gains. (Consult your Accountant before you start daytrading)

If you need more detailed advice about daytrading drop me a line.

I am a long term investor and not into daily trading. So this answer below, is probably not teh best answer for what you have asked.

But there will be important pointers to what should also be considered while deciding on the trading platform. So here goes.

I have personal experience with ICICIDirect, HDFC Securities and Motilal Oswal. I don't trade on a daily basis and am a long term investor. So for me brokerage rates don't matter much.

For me what matters are the following:
1. Reliability of the platform -I can transact when I want
2. Correctness in transaction records, account debits, demat credits, shortfall management
3. User-friendliness of interface - you can find what you want quickly
4. Promptness of customer helpdesk in replying to emails
5. Ability to do everything from one single place - like demat account, trading account, and bank account are all managed by the same entity, so there is single place of accountability

Given all these in my experience ICICIDirect still scores the best. It has the highest no of subscribers. It used to have some transaction problems earlier, but over the past year, I cannot recollect instances where I couldn't execute a buy/sell when I wanted it. (HDFC Securities & Motilal OSwal both have miles to go on this front, systems cant keep up with the load on exceptionally high traffic days -jan 22/23). Their User interface is the best, you can locate what to do and where very fast, almost intuitively. Their transaction records are impeccable, you have peace of mind. Couldn't say the same for Motilal Oswal (I had to track and remind them to make good the shortfall when I bought and paid for 20 shares of Wyeth Pharma but demat was only for 16 after a week). And single place of accountability makes sure i deal with the same party and can get things resolved faster.

No matter what arguments you hear against, perhaps the biggest argument in favour of ICICIDirect is that they have been operating these services from 1999. That's close to a decade of experience in handling extremes of load, variety of software and technical issues, customer complaints , and have matured over the years.

The others may give you cheaper brokerage rates (and that matters if you are a day trader) but have much more to cover before they can reach similar levels of maturity as a service provider.

My 2 cents. Hope they were useful & happy investing!

Here's something many traders don't know:
To "day trade" or "scalp": A trader MUST have - AT ALL TIMES - AT LEAST $25,000 U.S. CASH in his/her/their trading account.

This does not include any stocks or trades the trad err might be in. This is cold, hard U.S. CASH.

As soon as the account goes one cent below $25K, a whole different set of rules comes into play.

Check with your broker or any broker to confirm what I write. There MAY BE exceptions.

As far as penny shares:
They are far, far, far too risky and volatile.

Thanks for asking your Q! I enjoyed doing my best to answer it.

VTY,
Ron Berue
Yes, that is my real last name!

No you can not. but you can lose hundreds in seconds. 30 years investing.

"Only init 4 profit" seems like a nice person, and I have to say I love the name. I would like to add to what he said about the 3 day settlement period. You can buy and sell all you want as quickly as you want you just have to meet SEC requirnments. There are basically two laws that apply here, the settlement one and a day trading one. the settlement one has been covered by "only init 4 profit" and the daytrading one just states that no more than 3 day trades can be made within 4 business days. Now the law also says that you can have permission to get around them if you meet certain requirnments, they simply are to have a margin account type with a minimum of $25,000 in the account at all times. If it goes below 25,000 you have to stop making more than 3 trades within 4 busibness days untill it gose back over the 25,000 mark. also by having a margin account you never have to worry about the settlement dates no matter what the account value is.

Also if you are looking for an online broker, I use Scottrade, they are very cheep $7 trades for market and limit orders.

Hope this helps.

Day trading means you open and close your trade the same day. Day trading can be on a long or short position.

Short selling means you borrow a stock, sell it at one price, then buy it back at a lower price so you can return it. Short selling can be in any time frame that you like. From an hour to months. (Your broker will handle the borrow.)

Short selling can be dangerous. If a short position goes against you, you should cover it quickly. Personal opining: most of my short selling is as a day trade. I want to watch the action when I'm shorting.