3SOF

Quote from: Ares on February 17, 2007, 04:55:36 AM
Hi Wrangler,

The commission that I entered is a round trip. 9.95 + ECN fees to buy and another 9.95 + ECN fees to sell. Just rounded off the numbers for easier calculation.

With regards to my broker, I use Tradefreedom. It's a direct access broker where you could trade pre and post market if you want. You could also place a buy on the bid and sell at the offer. Looking forward to your comments about my analysis.

Thanks again,
Ares

Ares,

You might want to switch to www.interactivebrokers.com for the kind of trading you're doing. Trading 1000 or more it's about the same as TradeFreedom's pricing but for smaller trades no one beats them. Last I checked, stock trades were a penny a share but with a minimum $2 commission. So you could buy just 200 shares of a stock for $2! (Duh!) 300 for $3 and so on. I've done this a few times but mostly trade 1000 shares at a time with another account - mentioned below.

Not only are their fees low but they also have many different order types - some that are held on their servers (and therefore invisible to Level II) until your conditions are met. Then they're fired off to the market maker. This allows one to use order types that market makers just don't offer. Neat!

Most of the order types I haven't bothered to read their help on as I only have about 5K with IB whereas the bulk of my money is with BMO - in an RRSP trading account. That's where I do most of my trading. Their's is a web browser based trading platform - if we can call it that - and it's a pain in the ass compared to IB but, alas, IB doesn't (yet) handle RRSP accounts.

One order type that I sure wish BMO offered is a One Cancels All. With this order type you could enter a position and then bracket it with a Stop Loss below and a Hard Sell above. If/when either one is triggered the other one is cancelled. Double neat!

Another bonus is that Medved Quotetracker interfaces with IB so you can do your trades directly in Quotetracker if you like. Click on the stock you want to trade and click Buy or Sell. Easy peasy. Come to think of it TradeFreedom interfaces with Quotetracker too doesn't it.

I have to go to work so I'll wrap this up now.

JELB

Quote from: Ares on February 11, 2007, 10:27:50 AM

I'm a Transit Operator. Most of the time, at the end of the loop, I read. If my eye won't hurt, I don't have to eat or sleep, and have no other responsibilities, I'll probably keep on reading.

Some of the books I've  read were:
1) The Market Maker's Edge by Josh Lukeman
2) Swift Trader by Charles Kim
3) Bollinger on Bollinger Bands by John Bollinger
4) by David Nassar
5) by "Trader Vic" Victor Sperandeo
6) Japanese Candlestick Charting by Steve Nison
7) a booklet from Vision Investing

Some of the Sites I check from time to time is:
1) NASDAQ.com and
2) StockScores

I took a course with:
1) Teach me to Trade and
2) Cyber Trading University

My main problem is controlling my emotions and respecting the trading plan I made before pulling the trigger to buy a stock that interest me.

Ares,

Hi.

Last time I saw you we were side by side in our buses at the light on Seymour at West Georgia. Obviously I took your tip to check out this site. I couldn't get registered until I finally tried disabling Yahoo Mail's Spam Filter temporarily. For some reason mail from this site's server was being flagged as Spam. Anyway I'm in now and it seems a good site.

To all you guys reading Ares's thread here I have to say I am impressed by his determination. As we both do the same job (though I'm a better driver.  ) I know how very stressful it can be.  For him to do that; keep a wife and three kids clothed, fed, and sheltered, plus get up well before the market opens (at 6:30 AM local), well, as I said, I'm impressed. Kudos Ares! I sure hope your determination pays off and you mature into a winning trader - sooner rather than later. (The same wish goes for me btw.  )

Ares first expressed interest in trading about three years ago. Right Ares? At that time I had much more limited (and bitter) experience but gave him whatever advise I thought useful. Seems he's been plugging away learning from the school of hard knocks that so many of us have done.

Judging by the list of books above you've done more reading than me. There is one book I've read that I believe I mentioned to you but I don't see on your list. It's called:

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

(ISBN-10: 0471770884 ISBN-13: 978-0471770886)

It seems to be highly regarded amongst successful traders that have been asked what books helped them in their learning. I certainly enjoyed it - but then what do I know? 

It's an old book written in the early 1900s when there were only hundreds instead of many thousands of stocks to trade. It's a bit dated as back then a trader could get to know the quirks of pretty well all the stocks. Nowadays that's impossible of course. (Then again though, now we have fancy computers for stock screening and technical analysis). It tells the fictional tale of the ups and downs of a, well, Stock Operator, and is meant to help one learn sound trading psychology. (As I recall, some people speculate that, while it's a fictional tale, it's one based on the real life experience of either its author or someone he interviewed for the book.

I still remember two of the lines in it that, to a newbie trader like myself, struck me as being opposite to "common sense," They went something like this: "I did exactly the wrong thing. I sold my winning positions and held onto the losing ones." I gather he meant he went on to watch the positions he'd sold (for a small profit) keep climbing and the losing ones he held onto wallow or decline further. So he sold his winners out of fear they'd pull back and he held onto his losers hoping they'd recover. I wish I could say I learnt well from this lesson but, judging by the bad decisions I've made in the last six months of very heavy trading, I haven't.

The other line I remember went something like "A stock is never too high in price to buy nor too low in price to sell," Here I assume he means stocks showing a long term climbing trend vs those doing the opposite. I've yet to take this lesson to heart too. How many times have I stayed out of stocks that I thought wouldn't likely go higher, only to watch them do so? Or bottom fish for stocks I thought wouldn't go lower, only to watch them do so?

Like you Ares, I've yet to learn to control or ignore my emotions; my fears and hopes. I guess this is something all newbies have to get through or else throw in the towel - which is not something I'm willing to do.

Well that's enough for now. Thanks for telling me about this board. It seems a good place.

JELB