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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RR who wrote (60360)	1/3/2004 5:48:50 PM
From: Jill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 65232

RR, I won on those options--60% in two days. I had gotten used to the trading range of that particular strike price. But I only won because some news came out. So I cashed them in and will see if I can do something similar again on a retrace at some point in January, or if not, not. Taking steady "small" profits, and keeping your own counsel (ramboids were chastising me for selling) is key. Teresa uses IB and has for years and so do most of her colleagues. Apparently their interface is relatively simple, but the caution is: if you are trading futures or any liquid fast vehicle, you have to also keep a broker you can call on the phone, because they have lousy phone support--and occasionally there will be a server glitch, and you'd want out of a trade and couldn't do it. So anyone who uses them keeps a backup broker for the rare but quite possible event above, so they can call their broker and say, "Get me outta this trade now!" :-) They are really cheap. Options, $1/contract; Fido charged me something like $12/contract. Well, since I am dealing with small amounts this eats into profit and over time that's a lot in commissions. For stocks, IB is .01/cents share up to 500 shares, and .005 greater than 500. Well, I'm not trading lots of 10,000 :-). So, all in all, that is a great savings. There is a thread on SI about IB. Anyway, I'm now going to have both accounts. But IB won't be active until January 15.