With Bright, you may be required to pay for their 3 day training, as well as wasting your time studying for Series 7. I look into it in 2009, I don't know if there is changes.
Thanks Drew, but I don't think that Bright is an option for me.... I've been trading for years without a S7 and have absolutely no intention on studying to take one. The license is completely obsolete if you are trading your own money, besides, the only thing that any of the prop firms I have spoken to will give you is 4 to 1 on overnights which I can get just using my reg T account. The biggest joke is that these CBSX firms that try to sell you on locking up your money for a year in addition to trying to take 5%-10% of profits b/c it's CBSX rules. Is there nowhere that just offers a straight up deal where they make an override on commissions? I think it's crazy that some of these firms have the audacity to ask for a percentage of profit when they have no skin in the game. I would rather just put up more money and trade 4-1 and pay nominal commission rates.
Why you just don't go and trade from the brokers office and negotiate a good commision? For example lightspeed have a trading floor with very good multimillionaire traders in there and they offer full rebates and very low comm. A real prop won't accept money from you and will give you a salary. Any company that ask for a deposit in exchange of a 10x1 laverage and a 10% cut with 0.005 comm is a scam. T3 won't give you any benefit. With them You have to pay for you own charts, scanners, news feed and they won't let you get rebates to cut your comm down (that's their income). And T3 won't let yoy trade 10x1 overnight. They only guy that makes money in that office is Marc and 2 others guy but they can afford to take huge risk because they have like 250 wannabe traders paying big comm to them.
I was about to trade with T3 a few months ago and this is what they offered me. 0-10k minimun deposit 1-0,006 comm 2-10x1 laverage (with no overnight positions) 3-Free chat room. 4-1 year deposit lock up due the CBXS 5-10% monthly cut. And that's it. They told me that I had to pay for my own chart and Filters, scanners and news (they told me that the exchange fees will be deduct from my account every month) . They also refuse to help me with the rebate thing. They ask for $3k for a 2 day chart traning but in reallity they were trying to sell my a book about chart reading. I must admit that at first I was impress with their office but soon I realized that they are sharing the entire floor with like 5 others firms. Not a very good deal and I turn them down.
What the trading floor looks like means nothing... half the guys I know that do well trade in places like that and half trade in a tiny office with 5 or 10 guys and make a killing every year... and if you saw how they dressed for work you would think they were homeless. I would love to see firm that offers "education" show their real turnover rate, especially considering that you're saying that they only support day trading. Day trading is a dead art on a day to day basis, that business is over. The only way to make money is multiday swing and long term trading. Any firm that is still "teaching" day trading as a way to make a living is just taking money from people who can't afford to lose it and giving them no chance to be profitable. I guarantee you that the owners and profitable traders on bigger floors like that barely day trade at all anymore themselves because it's not profitable, but they have no problem "educating" college kids and beginners to day trade. Very rarely are intraday moves tradable anymore, with the exception of special situations like lnkd and yndx.
Hello. I try their virtual trading floor and I saw their largest trader positions every day and he does daytrade a lot during the day but I think that he can trade with that kind of aggressiveness because he can afford to lose money on daily basis because he and the others partners makes a lot of money in commission. Im not 100% sure but I think that they make like 0,004 profit in commissions and with almost 300 newbie traders affilliate, that's a good business model (for them). I think that in today's environment the best thing one can made in this industry is to open yourself your own "prop" company and make money with others people money.
You can't blame your inability to trade the intraday timeframe profitably on HFT and other nonsense. Tell me exactly what you where exploiting profitably that HFT ruined for you. You can share because the edge is gone correct?
I'm glad somebody said that. My thoughts precisely. Unless you are scalping for 1 penny, what does HFT have to do with anything? The more volume, the better. IMO, there has seldom been a better environment for trading intraday in the past 10 years. Spreads at 1-2 cents? What a dream!
I haven't seen such a worse environment to intra-day trade than now. HFT don't provide liquity - they provide ''fake'' volume. Yes that's right, the kind of volume that does not fill you unless your sitting on edga/bosx and have to pay to get out!!! As for volatility and QE...it's been clearly demonstrated by many research papers that QE has killed spot volatility but that vix futures is on a steep curve, demonstrating that ppl are willing to pay a premium for volatility...you just can't benefit from it now. A perfect example is Monday worry day. Greece debt worries the mkt and propels a long awaited selloff....As a day trader, you walk in the morning only to see the mkt gapped down hard....yet...hmmmm...yet...we mostly chop around all day. But hey, maybe your right...maybe this is a prime environment to trade...what do I know.
ZR1 and the other amateur after him - Obviously the two of you are new to trading and because of that you don't have the slightest clue about what you're talking about. The biggest advantage that any trader had was the ability to read the tape, the order flow and know what the specialist was doing. Since you two amateurs feel it necessary to interject your uneducated opinions please pay attention. I started in about 1995 as one of the only floor traders on the NYSE to trade his own account, since you probably don't know most brokers on the floor only traded customer accounts for commissions. To put it bluntly, day trading on the floor was automatic, you knew where all the orders were, who was buying, who was selling and how much they had left. Also, there was an uptick rule which meant far less whipping around on no volume. When the exchange began to become more computerized I moved "upstairs", you probably don't know what that means because you have no experience but look it up if need be. After the exchange went mostly electronic in the mid 2000's it was still a slow paced market... meaning you could get off size... Once again the fact that you said the HFT's don't affect you is just a perfect example of what insignificant volume you trade and how little you know. Before we moved to the fully hybrid model, traders like myself were able to take 50k - 200k share positions of stock within a tight price range without running the price of a stock up 2 dollars. For example, I could buy a 50k block of a stock like amzn, lvs when it was 100 dollars, goldman, etc without moving the price up and without having 50 programs jump in front of the order as soon as it was entered. Since you are probably trading 100 - 500 share lots of stock to you it might not matter, but to an actual trader being able to take size within a tight price range is extremely important. The way the HFT's work is off of big orders coming in, so now I can probably only gather 10k shares in the same price range I used to be able to gather 50k shares. Also, if I sent my order to the market it would be matched by the specialist unlike now when my order would just sweep through the market 2 dollars. My order would go 2 dollars through the market to get filled because all the HFT's would pull their offers as soon as my order came close to it. So, like I said, the market has changed due to HFT's to a point where day trading size is no longer viable and traders have to expand their time frames. So now my shortest term trades are multi-day and longer trades are months. And I guarantee you that any former day trader that did not adapt to this method is probably broke by now. Obviously you are new b/c if you weren't then you would know that about 90% of all daytrading firms, many which were around for over a decade, all of a sudden went out of business at exactly the same time... It's not a coincidence that it happens as soon as HFT became the majority of the markets volume. Bottom line is that for anyone who isn't a piker the HFT's made a big difference in terms of day trading. Longer term time frames however are completely unaffected because the price of a stock will always go where it is supposed to and in a longer time frame quick dollar moves don't matter. To conclude, ZR1, instead of reading and learning you felt it necessary to state your incorrect and unwanted opinion. From what you wrote anyone with any experience can tell that you are a joke, why don't you look up a list of prop firms from a year ago and see how many day trading firms are still in business. This is the last I will address you and I usually wouldn't spend time and energy responding to someone like you but I think it's important that the people that frequent this site to learn are provide accurate info.