Day Trading

Most trading tips providers or signal providers don't work. You can read reviews on most of them on http://www.forextopten.com and http://www.forexpeacearmy.com .

People spend years learning how to trade & you want a short quick answer……… sorry…. there is no such thing.

If there was a "best time" to trade… wouldn't all the professionals be doing it. I do have some rules for myself;
I never buy/sell before 10:00PM EDT
If a stock reaches its high 5 minutes before 4:00PM, I'll buy.
I never trade during the hours of 11:30AM-1:30PM (lunch)

BUT…. these rules mean nothing without a ton of information I or anyone here can give you.

Here's some places to start;
http://www.alphatrends.net/ (best "sum up" of daily activity on the web).
http://www.tradingwithtk.com/ (good teacher, dangerous stocks).
http://streamer.thinkorswim.com:8000/shadowtrader.m3u
(great market comentary during the day, 9:15AM - 4:00PM EDT).

ya@eriestocktrader.com

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.

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.

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.

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!

If you check out the following newsletters by Paul Farrell of CBS, you will know everything you will ever need to know about mutual fund investing:
http://www.marketwatch.com/Search/?property=column&value=paul+b%2e+farrell&scid=3&siteid=mktw&dist=mktwmore