Day Trading

Without knowing what you already know, it's hard to know what to tell you. What I will do is give you a link to great site for explaining the tax implications of trading stocks.

http://www.fairmark.com/capgain/

You can choose how much of the material you want to read, but I suggest you be sure to read the section on "wash sale" rules given the way you described your 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 .

There is a great website called Sharebuilder.com that will lead you through what you need to know. They have a great starter kit that costs about $50.00 but they give you a $50.00 certificate to purchase stock with. It is a very well executed website and the documentation should point you in the right direction.

I'm giving you some web sites to check out for day traders and swing traders. This will give you a "feel".
http://www.alphatrends.net/
http://www.thekirkreport.com/
http://www.slopeofhope.com/
http://www.tradingwithtk.com/
http://www.thinkorswim.com/
http://www.redoption.com/

Also, some good books to start with are;
Trading In the Zone, Mark Douglas
Mastering The Trade, John Carter
High Probability Trading, Link
Trade Your Way To Financial Freedom, Tharp

Learn the basics of "Technical Analysis" before you read these books. Understand Candlestick Charting, Moving Averages, Support & Resistance, RSI, Channels etc.

There are many great books out there…. Don't read any of them until you've gone through these. Don't ever underestimate the importance of money management, position sizing & trading psychology.

This will take at least a year to get through. Do it and you'll save yourself from many costly mistakes.

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

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.

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.

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.