Day Trading

With your money

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.

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.

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.

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!

Yes, there is a very good tool. If you use one of the trading sites online, such as E-Trade or AmeriTrade, you will find simple instructions on how to use it.

I would recommend you do a lot of research before you get involved with real money. Do "pretend" investing while you study the Motley Fool site carefully. It is full of great ideas.

"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.

Nobody expects you to hold a position for weeks/months. they just need you to wait until you have settled funds (3 days).

the restriction is to make sure that small investors (i.e. people who don’t even have 25k) don’t lose their shirts, and cheat the IRS out of tax revenue, because you are totally inept and will have carry-forward losses for the next decade.

this, of course, gets re-packaged as concern for small investors who need protection from themselves. but don’t let that fool you - it’s all about the tax revenue. nobody really cares enough about you to bother protecting you.

Check out interactive investor's share dealing service - you can deal on both UK and US online, and their phone support / dealing desk is open for US market hours (like any others worth their salt)