My understanding was that they accepted anyone with a heartbeat, and they started you out with ridiculously small size. And there were no costs to the trader. But I do remember a thread on this board about a pretty questionable contract. But here's the deal. The niece (college student with no money or real experience) of a friend of mine is interested in trading, been watching the markets for a while, has traded a sim account, watches CNBC... yada yada yada. You know the drill. I thought a beginner firm like that would be good for her. There would be no risk, and she would get the experience of the chat room, maybe a little training, possibly prop reports, and the experience of being with a "pro" firm and the community that goes with it. And the risk, and the pressure... again, I think you get it. She wants to do this on her own, although she did agree to let me pay the monthly fee for something like an equities combine, but I haven't found anything. I told her about TST and MES and SAVIUS, but she hasn't even looked at futures and isn't interested. Just equities. I've done extensive google and elite trader searches, to no avail. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places? Or maybe that model just completely died. Any ideas? Thanks.
Like a practice run with someone else's money for no cost? Hrmmm. That's a tough one. Not sure you'll find it. But who knows.
Yeah, I know. I think they started you out with a max of 5 shares at first. May have even been a sim account. But they are no longer around, so maybe that didn't even work.
They are gone. That model only worked when traders could churn 100's of thousands of shares a day. Nobody does that outside of HFT firms. I agree on the coding suggestion. Look, if she is young she has no idea what she wants yet, none of us did at that age. And like all of us, she thinks she "knows" stocks because she watches CNBC. The truth is she could probably trade palladium as well as she could trade AAPL. Regardless, the best advice you could give her is to learn R and Python and she can start for free at several places then shell out a few bucks (literally) for datacamp.
Kershner Trading Group might be worth a look. Might require in office participation (Austin or NYC). I don't think I'd call any of these programs "risk free" ...there's opportunity cost.
Thanks Mav. I was hoping to here from you. You basically confirmed my thoughts. I was surprised THT was doing what it was doing after a firm like Echotrade went down in 2013, so i figured anything similar might not even exist anymore. And since you are the second person suggesting the programming route, I will definitely pass that along. Edit.. Looks like Kershner requires a track record. She's only experimented on sim for a while. But thank you.
Good point about the opportunity cost. But she's in college and just wants to do it part time. Although I told her she would need to schedule her classes so she is at her desk for at least the first hour of the trading day. I think trading for an hour or 2 in the afternoon is just a complete waste of time and misses the point.