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Strategies & Market Trends : Trading is a Business -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George K. who wrote (5)	8/12/2001 5:17:05 PM
From: Cash	Respond to of 12

RE: A Part Time Business? I do not want to give up my other job yet which I would have to do to trade full time. If this is the case then make sure you do your desk job well while embarking on your journey. A reasonably priced direct access service for stocks I've heard Interacive Brokers and tradescape.com are good. They both have per share commissions which is really good when you're just doing 100 shares at a time to start (which is what you should be doing) A service that provides "squawk box" to the Chicago trading floors realtimefutures.com is good

To: George K. who wrote (5)	8/12/2001 6:11:26 PM
From: Brandon	Respond to of 12

I think that trading can be a profitable part time business, so long as it is treated as just that, a business . as for your questions. 1. A reasonably priced direct access service for stocks - not more than say 40 trades a week. Maybe as few as 10. Options would be great too because I now use Mr. Stock which is too sophisticated for my needs and way too slow. Also, I would hope that it would be strong on the intraday charts and include futures I know many people who have great success with IB for executions and QCharts for data. Prices at TerreNova, Cybercorp etc al. are also coming down so they may be of value, depending on how many shares you normally trade. If your normal trade is under 500 shares, it would be hard to beat IB. 2. Some kind of software to manage the record keeping or maybe the access service could do it for me. Im sure there is such a service, but I would not use it. I find great educational value in manually logging and recording my trades. Call me old fashion. 3. A service that provides "squawk box" to the Chicago trading floors because I want to get a sense of the sound of the futures trading. I have seen this mentioned in several publications and I'd like to listen to it for a few months as an alternative to CNBC which is insufferable for me lately. I have never used one so have nothing to offer here. I would say you can watch level2 and when you see a bunch of Island or Arca types jumping aboard all at once in a frantic manner that offers you the same sort of insight as a squak box would, and probably better because its more specific to the stock you are trading. 4. Whether I should mark myself to market starting in 2002 and take the position that I am also a trader. I believe I now meet the tests the IRS and courts use to determine "trader." I have no idea what your situation is, so couldn't reasonably say how you should file. Sorry. Hope this helps a bit. Brandon