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Non-Tech : Online Trading -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: David Meyer who wrote (41)	5/27/1998 5:17:00 PM
From: M_Power	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 49

Anyone see the blurb on Online Trading last night? It's that late-nite CNBC stock show (sorry I forget). Approximately 3 million on-line account holders, with as many as 14 million within 12 months. They advised day traders and frequent traders to avoid on-line services, citing both a "trading commission" AND the bid/ask spread. $10 trade commissions are quite alluring and misleading. They used a $12,000 stock purchase as an example: "$10 commission" + a (conservative) 1% bid/ask spread = $130 before capital gains. As I mentioned, an Over-The-Counter spread of 1/16 makes the on-line houses' profits even more inexcusable. I hope they're at least spending all that dough on some half-decent back-end and bandwidth... In all fairness, they concluded that on-line trading is fine if you plan to buy and hold.