Search results

I suspect this is user-specific. I sometimes trade at my father's place, on a 10-year-old 933MHz Pentium 3 with 512MB and a 1mbps DSL line, and TWS doesn't take more than 3 minutes to start up on that.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/opinion/to-ease-the-crisis-tax-financial-transactions.html : Indeed, a tax of just 0.05 percent levied on each stock, bond, derivative or currency transaction would be aimed at financial institutions’ casino-style trading, which helped precipitate the...

For years, TDA has had data feed and, occasionally, web server outages lasting up to several hours. Yet their DARTS are always exceeding expectations. Maybe they do the vast majority of their business via advisors, and the retail daytraders using Streamer and TOS are just a drop in the bucket.

I've had no problems running TWS (the web (JNLP) version, I haven't tried the standalone version) on Windows Server 2008R2 64-bit. If you think that's an option for you - Server 2008R2 gives you all the benefits of Windows 7 except for the desktop look and feel, which is more spartan - you...

Thank goodness you could cancel your market order. One broker I used to use would occasionally manually review orders (they couldn't tell me their algorithm, but it seemed that once I exceeded my overnight buying power then all orders for the rest of the day would be manually reviewed). If one...

Making bad decisions is gender neutral. Michael Armstrong led AT&T to buy TCI and MediaOne (cable companies) for over $100B, and less than two years later sold them to Comcast for $72B. That $28B loss dwarfs AT&T's eventual buyout by SBC for $17B a few years later.

As long as it doesn't become hard to borrow and you want to short it, there should be little difference among any broker that lets you trade equities.

The margin on the underlying may be 30% or more. Check with your broker to see what will happen. Worst case is they assign the stock to you, you get a margin call, and they automatically sell enough of your stock at market to meet the margin call. Some brokers will automatically have you buy...

I rolled over ESU1 to ESZ1 this morning at 09:46 by buying a calendar spread, but the execution prices in my trade log aren't anywhere near where the market was at that time. The spread value is correct. The prices look to be pretty close to yesterday's closing prices, if I had to guess where...

Problem is, as the bear funds drop as the market recovers, those put options are going to see their IV plummet, and the options won't go up nearly as much as you'd hoped. I usually trade long options, but for the past two weeks they've been too expensive so I've gone long in bull funds like FAS.

Can you explain this in more detail? When you say you "went to TWS" after getting the notice, are you saying the notice was delivered to you in a form other than a popup window in TWS? Via email, perhaps? When was the email sent?

In Chart Parameters, tick the box next to "Show data outside of regular trading hours".

Odds are that full service brokers keep their clients' idle money in a money market account where the client gets maybe 0.10% interest and the broker uses the money to make a few percent.

I hope they're not going to switch to TDA's quote feed. Too often, it provides quotes delayed by seconds or minutes, and sometimes the quotes just stop coming.

So, you applied for level 2 and were denied? Did you call and ask them why?

Who's your quote provider?

Wow, this thread's still here? The admonition not to scale out sounds like those who say your entry price should not affect your decision on when to exit - you should only exit when you think the price has topped. They make fine koans, but are unrealistic in a world where risk management is...

That's interesting. What if I don't want my order to be filled at a certain exchange because their fees are too high?

So many factors go into determining the net employment growth of a 300 million person country that I'm surprised it's given so much credence. And the government can't do anything to meaningfully improve employment numbers, anyway. QE2 was just a gift to the financial industry. NFP has been...

From what I've read and experienced, they're first-come-first-serve at each exchange. If I'm the first to put in a lower offer at CBOE, say, and the MM at PHLX drops his offer to be the same as my offer, then a trader whose broker only does business with PHLX may get the trade filled there...