Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Valid_Dark]

so, I'm looking for an online broker at the moment,
I've narrowed my decision down to 3 choices, and was wondering if anyone had any sort of opinions.

E-trade, Scottrade, and Lowtrade.
here is a basic rundown of each, along with pro's and cons of each.

E-trade,
big company easy to set up account / transfer funds to, no opening amount.
$10 per trade plus 75¢ contracts,  but E-trade also trades in Futures which I might expand into eventually (but probabbly not).
they do margin trading, but at like 8.5% (Margin trading is when you get a loan from them against your current investments with them, then you invest the money you get from the loan, as long as it makes more than the interest you're paying on the loan, it's another source of income)
if I can prove to myself that I can steadily make more than the interest rate, I might consider going this route.
Also, they are very easy to start an account with and easy to put money into / out of, and they have really neat stock market tools and programs that seem really helpful, and have Level 2 quotes for free. $500 to open an account.

Lowtrades,
small company, hard to set up an account, have to print off paperwork and fill it out, and have to send them a check to put money into the account.
$5 per trade, plus 60¢ contracts,
but they charge $15 a month to use their trading programs and lvl 2 quotes,  and they don't offer futures like E-trade, OR margin trading.

Scottrades
somewhat imbetween Lowtrades and E-trade,
$7 per trade, and $1.25 per contract, no futures either, but has margin trading at lower interest rate, something like 7.7%
has programs with lvl 2 quotes for free.

E-trade looks like it has the best programs and phone apps, and they have a local branch that offers free seminars and stuff to members, and I can go in and meet with financial advisers and get their opinions on my portfolio etc.

as of right now I think i'll be using a contract for most of my trades, a contract is where you set a certain price on a stock and it will automatically buy / sell when it gets to that price. 1 contract works for 100 shares,.. I think,...

oh and Lowtrade has a min. opening amount of $500, but thats how much I was planning on starting with anyways, the other 2 don't have any sort of min. opening amount.

soooooo opinions?
I think i'll have 2 or 3 different stocks at a time, going to try to aim for stocks with lower values, or maybe even penny stocks if I can work it out.

because buying a stock thats $20 and selling at $25 is a 25% profit, while a $1 stock going to $1.25 is also a 25% profit, and a stock is more likely to climb 25¢ than $5 in a short period of time,

[Karlito]

Can't help you much myself, but information in this thread may be relevant to your interests.

[Valid_Dark]

Thank you for that read, it was a good read.

I am going to go with OptionsXpress, one that I wasn't even considering a hour ago.  Looked at a list of the best brokers of 2012, and this was listed as #3, behind OptionsHouse, which had trades at $4 each, but they require $1000 to sign up, and Scottrades was listed as 2nd, but OptionsXpress offers better options for daytrading, which is what I wanted to get into.
also, OptionsXpress has a deal right now where they give you $100 for signing up with them. so I'm going to take advantage of that.

[Valid_Dark]

Ohh and they offer tools for paper trading,
and Lord Bucket was saying you should paper trade before you start with real money, so I'm going to do that for a few days probably,
but I think I'm pretty prepared for trading real money, but we'll see how it goes!
I'm excited.

[LordBucket]

opinions?

Like Karlito says, there's a lot of useful information in the other thread he linked.

One quick comment, however:

buying a stock thats $20 and selling at $25 is a 25% profit

a $1 stock going to $1.25 is also a 25% profit

That's a misleading simplification. Be sure you understand how buy-sell spreads work and don't underestimate the impact of broker's fees.

I strongly recommend you read the example given in this post.

[werty892]

I thought this was a spambot O_O

[Valid_Dark]

Oh but I am a spam bot,
and yeah, thanks for the links Lordbucket, I already read that post of yours when Karlito posted a link to it.
I'm excited to start trading, going to start with paper trades for a while, the online broker I signed up with has a paper trading option, where you can use all their tools and stuff and it all works like if you were using real money, but with fake money, so thats pretty cool.
once I get comfortable enough I'll switch to real money.
and I decided to get a used car instead of a new car, (was planning on buying a new car in the next week or so)
so instead I think i'm going to stick that other $5k in the stock market as well, well depending on how well I do.
your button analogy helped me decide this.

[penguinofhonor]

I thought this was a spambot O_O