Hi all, Due to some odd conditions, I ended up opening a brokerage account with Scottrade over my first choice, IB. I plan to swing trade until I accumulate enough capital to satisfy the daytrading requirements, at which point I will most likely switch to IB. In the meantime, I've noticed Scottrader is pretty inadequate in terms of intraday indicators, only offering volume and simple MAs. Does anyone here use Scottrader for intraday trading, and if so, what do you use for indicators? I have a swing strategy based on stochastics, and I'd love to see if this can work on daytrades too. Cheers!
I have a scot trade account that I opened to trade bonds when the time is right. About 4 months ago, I couldn't even access my IB account and so I closed it and started using Scot Trade for quotes. I import them to QT and the reliability is terrible. Couldn't get quotes on either computer today. I would never try to daytrade with these guys and their broker fees are too high.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Yeah, today, Scottrader was completely messed up, at one point only updating ONE SINGLE SYMBOL that I was monitoring. And I had to enter trades by phone (!) So, I think I'll be switching ASAP. That having been said, my local branch has been nothing but helpful so far.
Scottrade is setup to make retired school teachers feel good about themselves. There marketing ploy is to make them think "I just did some thing smart, I went from paying 100 commission to ten and that Roger Riney fellow is there ito help whenever I need him" Do you know the difference between paying one dollar in commission and paying eight is for a trader? And the pattern day trading rule isn't something made up by interactivebrokers it was made up by the SEC and bribed senators. You can't get around it with Scottrade. If you want to trade and have less than $25000 US you need to look at trading futures(and limiting risk with options)or Canadian or European stocks through a broker like IB(or one with similar commission I think IB is the worst broker except for all the rest)
I used Scottrade for intraday trading up until 3 months ago. The Scottrade Elite software has most all the indicators any other software has. But I think you have to have a $25K account to get access to that. Scottrade wasn't too bad, but I'm happier with IB. Unless you're trading more than a thousand shares you'd save a lot of commission fees with IB.
I use scottrade also and scan thru stockcharts.com for ideas. I'll be moving my account asap, today is the third day in-a-row the data feed is bad. I called and the 1st guy said it was fixed, the tech support guy said they were working on it, but didn't say when it would be fixed.
I'm opening an account with IB today. Well, ASAP, anyway! As mentioned above, the difference between $1 and $7 is killing me. Not to mention that awful datafeed, although I believe it was okay on Friday.