Handsome - sorry about your illness - I am sure we will all try to help you - but trading is usuallly a losing game the first year if you are extremely talented - otherwise it's 2 years. Trading requires immense time and research - you'll need to read 50 books and make 500 trades and study 12hrs/day for a year before you really get to know all the ways you can lose. Give it a shot, but with money you can afford to lose - don't say we didn't tell you so. Regarding your question, www.interactivebrokers.com does all of this automatically. Your first research project should be to spend at least 2 weeks reading the posts on this board - here you will find beginner info, psychology pitfalls, veteran trader tips etc. Best of luck and wellness to you.
Regarding trading and taxes...even if you have a LOSS, you'll still have to file because the broker will only report your sales. In other words, if you sell $500,000 in securities in the course of 1 year the broker will report your income as $500,000 to the IRS even if you paid $1 million and actually LOST $500K! These tax reporting rules are really stupid and just increase reporting/paperwork and keeps IRS jokers employed but that's the law and nothing you can do about it. Simple answer is...you sell any stock in any year, you NEED to file otherwise the IRS will want their share even if you don't have it!
Handsome, Welcome to ET. I hope you find your experience here fruitful. I recently have had to face a similar life experience that you have. I hope to see you posting about your progress. Good Trading to You. Michael B.
Under the new IRS rules effective tax year 2005 all trades and the individual profit or loss on each trade will have to be reported to the IRS for retail traders. Hope this helps.
Forget it. Ain't gunna happen .. .. and with a bad mindf**k, you being ill 'n' all .. know what I mean.
Handsome, You might want to practice trading on paper first. If I can't make money paper trading then I doubt I can make money by real trading. You might want to consider your feelings concerning activity, productivity and value. I remember about 20 years ago feeling unemployed and lonely. I caught myself trading just to chat with a broker by telephone. I recall losing money then. Now I trade to earn a profit. It is a different kind of trading. I may not trade for months. I may hold a position for years. If I get lonely then I visit elitetrader.com. If I get bored then I play Diablo on the computer. If I get productive then I write computer programs to test trading methods.