Just started trading and want opinions.

Discussion in 'Professional Trading' started by fastwanabe, Oct 5, 2008.

  1. Hi my name is Josue and just recently began trading and like everybody else I lost some and gained some(lucky to have WB prior to spike then sold on Fri). Anyway, since my capital is so low(1500) I was thinking about have three diff brokers so I could trade everyday and not have to wait for the 3 day settlement rule to stop me from making daily trades. I started with 500 with Scottrade and I dont have a margin account. I was thinking using 3 diff brokers might work. I know that comm fees will take a lot of profit but in the long run I think I can amass 25k and have a daytrading account faster this way. What do you guys think?

    example

    Mon-Scottrade
    Tue-Tradeking
    Wed-Zecco
    Thur-Scottrade
    Fri-Tradeking
    and so forth........
     
  2. hmm...let do the math here. You want to day trade with 500 bucks in your scottrade account. At scottrade it costs 7 bucks to buy and 7 bucks to sell. That means if you buy a stock with your whole 500 bucks and it goes up 3% in one day, then your profit for that after commissions for that trade is about 1 dollar. Well...i guess if you do that 4 times a day, you can double your account in just over 1 year. Thats assumming no losing trades....oh i forgot to subtract weekends/holidays...make that about two years then or so.

    Honestly, i think you are going to blow your account just with paying commissions. If i were you, i would just pick a couple long shot options(calls or puts) that are a year away from expy and come back a year later and hope you've made 25k from it.
     
  3. dero

    dero

    I don't understand your point of having three accounts; why not, instead of having three accounts with 500 dollars each, just trade only 500 dollars worth each day in one account. During a settlement hold, money you did not use in the trade is not frozen. When and if you get to $2K, you can request margin.
     
  4. lol? 500 dollars for daytrading? do you know what day trading is?
     
  5. joemiami

    joemiami Guest

    fastwanabe...sorry but your idea of using 3 brokers shows one thing.... you have no idea what you are doing. If you cant be constantly profitable using ONE broker then you need to revise your trading strategy, practice on a simulator, backtest, etc. Then when you are consistent in the sim then maybe you'll be ready to trade for real again.
     
  6. JCVR

    JCVR

    You should look into trading futures or something where you can get margin on a small account and don't have to worry about PDT rules. Trading equities with 1,500 is just not going to work.
     
  7. Trading futures with $1500 is not going to work either.
     
  8. rosy2

    rosy2

    agreed. when the odds are against you your best bet is to gamble.
     
  9. Fast one,

    theres a lot of lotto number picking algorithms on the net- try those
     
  10. bstay

    bstay

    $1500 capital is definitely not enough. you need to borrow from friends/colleagues/parents/credit cards and banks to make up the $25K minimum requirement for daytrading account.

    your plan was to daytrade $1500 on 3 separate brokerages (to go around the PDT rules), and make enough to grow your capital to $25K. with that kind of "success rate", you could borrow to start with $25K and make enough to pay off the loans in no time.
     
    #10     Oct 5, 2008