anyone have any recommendations? in order of importance, my criteria: 1. no account minimum and no inactivity fee(if you can think of a broker that has a reasonable minimum.. 1000-1500, feel free to recommend that one) 2. competitive commish 3. good spreads (for options, etc) 4. decent web interface/charts 5. good fills/high speed i'd consider myself an active trader.. i plan to get in and get out quick for profits, but definitely going to steer far from being patterned a day trader. i mostly plan to buy calls. so far.. i've looked into scottrade.. thinkorswim looks top-notch, but their account minimum (3500) is a bit high for me.. love their software/platform though.
And you expect to be profitable doing this with Options. LMAO!!!! Now your funny, in a not so smart kinda way . $3,500 is too much for you, so you go with options because it allows you to have leverage and manage large positions with a small account, and you believe you can "day-trade" options effectively, yet probably have no experience with options, or probably as much as you have played with on ToS. Recipe for disaster. Just letting ya know.
nobletrading.com has no account minimums. but i would stay away from daytrading options with anyone period, could get expensive
You have no idea what you are doing. You aren't ready to trade yet. If you had even the foggiest notion of what you were doing, you would know that brokers do not determine options spreads, and that instead markets do so through their auction process. I predict you will do it anyway, and that you will lose most of your capital. Don't even think about trading options until you learn how to trade stock. One reason is that you need to make your losses as small as possible, so that you can survive long enough to learn how to trade. You can trade at stock at far lower cost than options, relative to the amount of price movement, so you must stay away from options until you are far more advanced. Another reason to avoid options, until you are far more advanced, is that options are far more difficult to trade than stocks, because long options are continually losing their value to "time decay", and short options can blow up in your face and leave you with sudden large losses. Repeat: don't even think about trading options yet. Let me also express my sympathies, in advance, for the future loss of your trading capital.
i cannot even begin to tell you how completely wrong you are. first of all, you have no idea who i am. you don't know that i have an insanely abnormal winning percentage trading the foreign exchange, based purely on technical analysis rules i've devised completely from my own creativity and genius intellect. i simply noticed that scottrade had wider spreads on the same exact option contracts versus thinkorswim. that's all. anyhow, to post such a threatening and negative message while making broad assumptions about individuals you don't know on the internet lends me to believe you yourself are getting hammered by whatever financial market you're trading. tough luck. unfortunately, we cannot all be winners.