I am fairly new to online trading. I am Currently using the brokerage service offered by my Bank. I am wondering if there are better options available. Here are the pros and cons for my service, maybe some of you could offer me some better alternatives:
1} It takes considerable effort to findout if a transaction is executed, I trade pretty heavy, and I have to go into open orders which holds everything that I've done over the last week, and keep clicking on a button that says: "retrieve more orders" Some times it can take me 15 minutes to verify a trade was executed, in this Day Trading business I can lose an opportunity or a fortune.
2) I can not easily modify orders, if I sell a security, and then realize it's tanking and forget cancel my existing order (as I can't modify it) then I take about 3 minutes completing a stop transaction only to be told, upon completion that it can not be processed because some of the shares have sales pending against them. This happened to me yesterday with GMAI, I went in rather High at 17 and 18. it started a nose dive from 15 and by the time I tried to sell, failed, canceled and finally sold it was at 12.
3) On the other hands, I have had most all of my trades completed quickly, and have never had an order only partially fill, I have had orders split into up to 4 transactions with no extra charge.
4) It is quite cumbersome to find out what I am currently holding in my portfolio and what I paid for it, usually I have to look in about 2 places to track that info down.
5) Another nice feature is that the funds can be covered directly from my bank accounts and thus with 4 days to cover the trades makes it pretty easy. How many days to you have with other online services? Do they ever stop you from making a purchase if you don't have the funds to cover? (Say I want to buy 1000 shares of XYZ at $60 per share, that's 60K and say I only have 10K in the account at the time)
Thanks in advance - Gary |
