Day Trading

send an email if you like and I will give you names of a couple of these that are worth investigation. I don't sell any of them and have no affiliation with the companies. Good Luck, Good Fortune, and Keep those very wary eyes WIDE OPEN!!

Contact the company you want to buy or their clearing agent directly and sign up for a DRIP account (dividend reinvestment program).

You're buying the stock directly from the company for the market price the day the get your order. They will buy it from you at market price when you want to sell. No brokerage fees, dividends reinvested for free. Sell when you want. Slightly longer lead times than going through a broker.

Have fun

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I remember reading of all the great things that Corning had going for it, so I bought. The news kept glowing about how well their technology and product was doing, but the stock kept falling and falling. Then about a week after I'd lost my nerve and sold it, fearing some unannounced problem, the price started going back up, and up, and up. Sometimes timing is very important.

There are the fundamentals of how the company is doing, but if the market has better things to do, your hopes and ambitions for any given company will just have to be put on hold. This is the technical aspect of trading, watching what the market is doing. As a small fish, you can't buck the current forever, sometimes you have to simply go with the flow if you want to get ahead. That is what the charts and trends and averages are all about.

Investors, in it for the long haul, into a company because they want to be a part of what the company does, they don't much care about technical issues like I had mentioned. I was more interested in what the market was doing to the price of the stock than what the company was doing with their assets, the value that the stock represents. Decide which you will be doing. If a trader, then watch the charts and trends. If an investor, you don't lose on stock prices until you lose interest and sell at a time when it just happens to be selling at less than you paid.

To trade and/or invest you need four major programs in place before you do anything.
1 A written sound trading/investment plan with rules that will not only help you but more importantly protect you, mostly from yourself.
2 - Sufficient trading/investment capital. Use your own money, there’s no need to go into debt so that you trade/invest.
3 - A written money management program in place. Remember never invest 100% of your capital into any one security and never have 100% of your capital invested.
4 – A full and complete understanding of the rules & regulations of the industry.

Judging by the wording of your question you’re no where near being ready to do anything in the market. I’m not saying this as a put down but rather as a warning before you hurt yourself financially.

Find the articles online that have evaluated and compared online brokerages. I found a good one online in Barron's, but you'll find others in the trading magazines.

This is worth putting a little time and effort into, because it's a pain to switch, so once you choose, you're kinda stuck with it.

Townsend Electronics, the Parent company of TerraNova, is the one that digitized and electronified the Nasdaq. They are technological industry leaders and have a powerful and well built trading system.

I use RealTick at TerraNovaOnline, but it costs $275/mo. I think the Investor package is free to use, and just uses one screen.

What you should try is a free trial of their Investor demo. Their rates are good also, but of course, it depends on how often you trade. It will take you months to learn all the bells and whistles of what this program can do.

The other top-of-the line program is TradeStation, but it costs big bucks to join and operate. Some people consider it the Cadillac of trading and technical analysis.

TerraNova is the home of the Day Trader, so they think nothing of you making several hundred trades a day. You don't have to do that, but it's okay here if you do.

These trial trade programs do not always properly simulate the market. I would not trust them.

Learn before you burn yourself out. Most (and i really mean most) people lose money day trading. You need a discipline that is hard to master. You need to know how and when to take a loss as this is what saves you to trade again in search of the winners. Stop loss orders are very important. And you need to realize that you are trading against professionals who get better executions of orders, have better information and faster access to it. You are also trading against computer programs.

Options are for the most part a highly speculative venture unless you are writing covered calls to try and boost your return on your long positions.

read the educational stuff at bobbrinker.com