Day Trading

There's a special address for Canadians, https://www.thinkorswimcanada.com/.

Simply the best for swing trading stocks and options. There's even an audio program all day (9:15-11:30AM & 1:30-4:00PM, EST) . The program also answers questions on specific technical questions (on specific stocks) & there's a video/chart which you can see the "ShadowTrader" actually show what he's referring to.

The platform is great (really great!!!). Charts are great (both TOS and Profet). Service is great.

They have many conditional order types including;
Blast 6
One Cancells Other (great for putting in a stop and limit price at the same time).
1st Triggers next
Chose by time & date execution.
Market Close
and many more

There graphs art great. Service is great. You'll be amazed. This platform was rated #1 by Barron's in their March 2007 best online broker article ((for software based brokers).
They were an incredible hit in Las vegas at the TradersExpo this past November. More people were checking them out more than any other broker.

I've been with them since April 2007.
(I have used Schwab (active trader program), Ameritrade, Scottrade and Fidelity).

The only thing they lack is "BackTesting" and that's coming out in this month.

Other ideas for good platforms;
TradeStation (good charting, backtesting + much more)
Iinteractive Brokers (fair charting, over 40 order types).

I'm not familiar with CNBC's Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge, so I don't know what their investing time horizon is like for this task. Depending on how long that horizon is, I would probably make different sets of choices for your million dollars. Over a longer horizon, I would probably do some research and then pick 20 stocks, $50,000 each, and then let them sit there and do nothing for several months as that is, historically, the best way to get a return on investment. Too much "in and out" of the market would kill you on commission costs alone anyway.

Any person, website, company that is going to charge you for trading tips is most likely making more money on you than they ever will following their own advice.

The whole premise behind active trading is that the market is ineffeicient and thus, short-term opportunities arise to take advantage of such innefficiencies. The problem is that once an inefficiency is identified and gets mass publicity, it ceases to work as the trading/investing community starts to discount that information into the price.

What you need is education, not tips. Its the difference between being given a fish and learning to fish. Some strategies very well may work 80-90% of the time IN SOME SCENARIOS. But nothing will work 80-90% of the time in every kind of market.

There are really 2 main kinds of strategies out there.

1.) Those that work in a trending market
2.) Those that work in a range

The only thing these paid services are SOMETIMES good for is leads. Its up to you and your education & judgment to determine if these leads are good enough to implement with your hard earned cash.

But in order to decide this, you must have some method that you are consistently using to discriminate between what makes a good and what makes a bad trade. If you are not willing to take the time to learn this, then you should simply put your money in an ETF and/or mutual fund and be happy with getting your 8-10% on average.

If you are willing to educate yourself there are a number of resources available to you.

http://www.EliteTrader.com is a thriving community of traders where you can get brokerage reviews, vendor reviews, educational material reviews, etc…well worth looking into.

http://www.WilyTrader.com is a blog where you can see first hand what it is like to be an active trader and get a feel for the different kinds of strategies that are necessary for success.

http://www.traderfeed.blogspot.com is Brett Steenbarger's website where he talks about the psychological aspects of trading

http://www.Amazon.com : and look up the following books/authors:
The Master Profit Plan
Mastering the Trade
Brett Steenbarger (Get both of his books)
Trading For a Living

In short, just be very careful about any service offering you the sky. I guarantee you that such rewards to not come without great risks, and more often than not, those risks will come to fruition way before you see a dime of those rewards.

Hope this helps

Hope this helps!

Regards,

As far as day trading it could be really sketchy at best because the trend is on a 24hr schedule but reading the news on recals product safety that sort of thing or what ever the news.

Ok case in point XM is doing great

Howard stern says hes signed a 5 year contract with serrius

Overnight 10's of thousands signed up for service.

I'm willing to be XM's stock slid nearly as much as sirrius's went up.

By law the minimum amount needed to open a daytrading account is $25,000. This will open a margin account, with which you can daytrade up to four times the amount that you have in your account. So with a minimum account of $25,000 you can daytrade up to $100,000 per day. (There are some restrictions) You must pay interest on any amount that you hold overnight that is in excess of the cash in your account. Daytraders never hold anything overnight.

There are many different styles of daytrading. You can trade gaps up, or gaps down. You can trade technicals or breakouts. You can trade a particular stock or group of stocks. Each style requires a specific set of tools and the skills to use them. At a minimum you will need a good broadband internet connection, streaming level 2 quotes, and a good broker. Quotetracker is a good, free platform that you can download and try, just to get a feel for what is involved. Also I believe that Scottrade will let you download and try their platform for free.

The broker that you choose depends upon your style of trading and the volume that you trade. Flat fee commission brokers like Scottrade are fine if you trade volumes above 1000 shares at a time. On a thirty dollar stock, that's $30,000 per trade. Personally I may buy more than 1000 shares, but I'll often take a position 100 shares at a time. So in my case paying $7 for each of those 100 share trades would kill me on commissions. Instead I use a broker that charges per share, not per trade. If you're not dealing in high volume it's best to pay per share, not per trade. That way you can buy 100 shares and it will only cost you $1 in commission.

The other thing that you should consider, just in case you do make money daytrading, is taxes. Although the advent of online tax services has made keeping track of all those daytrades considerably easier, it can still be a headache. It's much easier just to buy a stock, hold it all year, and then pay the taxes on it. Very simple.

I do not believe that daytrading is the best way to go for a beginner. It would be better to start by just buying and holding, or swingtrading. Personally I now use a service that sends me alerts on what to buy and sell. It actually works much better than I could ever do on my own, and it's a whole lot easier. Still it's quite common for me to lose $1000 or more per day. But on average my up days far outweigh my down days.

Yes, I do this for a living, and it is much easier than having a real job.