Called CT today; was told that there will be no shorting of stocks through any ecn's, regardless if pre/post or during market hours. CT has been bought then hacked to pieces...
Apparently you cannot short at all through ECNs. I am not familiar with the SS Pro platform, but other posters have said that is the case with it. It doesn't make any sense at all to me.
Anyone have any experiences with Ameritrade? There is another thread about an auto trading program called Cool trade which has a sweet deal with Ameritrade, $1 a trade. Through something called IZone. It wasn't clear to me how IZone differed from the standard Ameritrade experience. It seems to offer a direct access interface, although it looked pretty clunky, ie you have to type in the trade info.
you can speak to the active trader group and request the per-share pricing if you are currently a cybertrader client. I have per-share pricing on StreetSmartPro
I have been using the SS Pro with per-share pricing and direct access for opening longs or covering shorts, for about 4 days now. Not being able to short through an ECN SUCKS !!!! so bad!!! Here is the explanation I got as to why it is done this way " The order needs to go through smartEx so that our brokerage can evaluate the order and make sure we have the shares available to short" And judging by the time it takes to get filled I can actually imagine a dude sitting there looking at the order scratching his ass and going through a filing cabinet to see if there are some share in there ... if you want to get filled on a short you have to go way below the best bid, and in this trading environment you will be chasing it down.. I have an account with Scottrade for buy n holds and just for the sake of it I put in a short today and it filled in a half second.... this is so wrong !!!
YEP, I attempted to short PCU a few months ago. Order placed. Hit limit. no execution. stock continues down. Im baffled! My order then gets canceled. Im even more baffled. I get a call from Scwhab on the phone. The "broker" informs me that they are not brining in any more shares of PCU to short. This was a huge 100 share order..lol still baffled.
Does the below make any sense; I thought that Penson had one of the most fluent short shares available. "Short Share Availability Schwab has a more extensive stock inventory of both easy and hard to borrow stocks than what is currently available at CyberTrader. And although available short shares for a stock are not displayed in StreetSmart Proâs Trading Window (Level II), the order will still be accepted when available shares exist."