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Wonder why it took them this long to change back. NASDAQ stocks have been allowed to have fewer-than-4-letter tickers for awhile.

LOL, you'll never get "all" congressmen to agree on anything. Do you have a source for this?

LOL. A coworker's girlfriend once wrote a song called "Wouldn't It Be Better If we All Just Rode Horses?". The genie is out of the bottle. The world is not going back to pre-industrial revolution living conditions, no matter how much the tree-huggers wish it.

If Ameritrade sends your order to, say, NITE, and NITE doesn't have anyone willing to buy at your limit price, are they obligated to yield your order to some other MM who is, or can they hold onto it?

The folder has 335 thousand files and each takes up a minimum of, I think, 4 kilobytes on disk even if they're only 1 byte long. I echo the advice to call IB and ask if there's something turned on that creates so many files. There should normally be only a few dozen files there.

There seems to be competition for new customers, which is why a lot of brokerages give bonuses like a month of free trades, but once people are with a brokerage there seems to be fairly high inertia. This would explain why TDAmeritrade maintains its DART numbers despite its not-infrequent data...

I need to call them once every year or two when an option order gets stuck, e.g. an order is magenta or light blue meaning it didn't get acknowledged. My advice in general is, if you don't like the response IB gives you, just try again. Last year, I had an order to close out VIX options...

Lightspeed's commissions are $.60/contract, $1 minimum, no ticket charge, no cancellation charges. I don't use them so can't speak about their quality.

I use iTWS on the iPhone when I'm on the train during premarket hours. It has just the right number of required confirmation taps so that a single mis-tap doesn't become a disaster. Lack of real estate is a problem; while you're submitting or modifying an order, the only prices you see are of...

VXX is supposed to track an index that tracks a varying proportion of the front 2 months of VIX futures. However, there appears to be an element of supply and demand at work, too, because VXX trades with a finer granularity than the VIX futures and varies in price even when the VIX futures'...

That "so long" can be "the rest of this year or more". Employment numbers are still in the doldrums, giving the Fed an excuse to have a QE3. Don't fight the Fed.

It's hard to check with a high-volume stock with a 1-penny spread, but another possibility is that your order isn't being shown publicly at all. I experienced this with a few stocks at E*Trade. My orders, round lots of several hundred shares, were limit orders placed inside the bid-ask spread...

You could have gotten a 300%+ return by buying SPY in 1993 and selling it in 2000, as well. The 1990's were a great bull market.

Here's an AP article about the settlement. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/New-settlement-offered-in-TD-apf-1059666922.html?x=0 They say only people who've suffered identity theft will get $$. Still better than the first proposed settlement, which gave customers an anti-spam subscription and...

Who besides IB and Tradestation charge cancellation fees?

My father had 10 shares of United Brands (Chiquita) when I was a kid. He got the 33-cent dividend checks, I got these great glossy colorful annual reports to cut up.

And if the US did support Mubarek, it would give fuel to all the radicals in the region. Anything the US does or does not do is reason for the radicals to hate it.

I don't think we'll see a top until QE2 runs out.

Do they document this? TD says that they might liquidate an options position if the account can't support the options being exercised, but nothing about declining to exercise ITM options at expiration.

The so-called "greek" variables tell you this. A primer is at http://www.investopedia.com/articles/optioninvestor/02/120602.asp .