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Over the past few weeks I've noticed that TWS often does not recover data connections after a connectivity outage (e.g. my DSL line going down for a couple minutes). I can still see an up-to-date account window, but to get data feeds to work again, I have to exit and restart TWS.

Schwab's SSPro platform is great for moderately active traders - I used it almost daily from 2001-2008. And customer service was great - generally answer within 30 seconds. and the first person you reached could handle virtually every issue. For daytraders, there was just one issue: sometimes...

Until QE2 is exhausted in a few months, there's no reason to think the market will go down. VIX could see 10 by then. Don't Fight the Fed.

If you place an order at a price that is better than the NBBO, often other MM's will join you at that price. This leads to a chance to manipulate markets, which can get you in trouble with the regulators. Let's say you have 10 CYH options - which typically have a large spread and are...

SPY gives a dividend every three months on the date of the quarterly futures expiration.

Several of those stocks are extremely susceptible to bad news and are only now coming back to where they were a few years ago. Look at 5-year charts of LVS and VMW.

If it closes at $20 and there isn't any news out that would affect its price, and you put in an extended session order to buy at $20.50, it will probably get filled immediately. Some stocks trade actively after-hours, some don't and have very high asks and very low bids and 20.50 might not be...

Your testimonial as a purported satisfied user who just discovered some wonderful software would be more believable if that web site didn't have your username (levniss) on almost every single page (look at the HTML source).

Can you call people who don't have a umi and just use voice? If so, it seems comparable to Vonage, which costs $25.99/month. Still (a lot) more than what Skype and Google charge, but non-techies are willing to pay a lot for telecomm.

It was up 36% over the last 3 months, so there was plenty of room to drop. I'm not going to catch a falling knife even though a 33% haircut on a 1 to 2% revenue miss looks like a huge overreaction. I've been trading RAX, CTXS, and VMW instead, which are down 8 to 12% in sympathy.

The advantages of an iPad are its lightness and (if you enrolled early enough) inexpensive flat-rate data plan. Otherwise a notebook is superior. I sometimes use iTWS on an iPhone. On something with a 7" screen, say, the new Blackberry, you could have a market data panel and a couple trading...

Same thing can happen when you buy stock. I think OSTK a few years ago had many more shares short than the entire float. Are ETF's more susceptible to this problem than ordinary stocks?

Looks like you're using Vanguard. In my experience, they don't cheat customers.. It is not unusual for market makers to lower the bid as appropriate on market open to scoop up unduly low limit orders. It's more common on thinly traded issues like options. Sometimes they will actually match...

As long as you have enough to cover the ownership of the stock if it's assigned to you (and this would include having at least $2000 in non-option assets in order to be able to own stock on margin) it seems unlikely the margin reqt for a short put would be raised above the max possible loss...

If you think the market will run higher, run some numbers. Factor in not only the expected option price due to the underlying but also the historical volatility to reckon how much lower IV will get, and how much lower the value of the options will become due to time decay. Personally, once my...

Well, VIX options, both puts and calls, increase in price as the market volatility goes up. When the market had its 1000 point intraday drop a few weeks ago, I remember VIX puts (which I happened to be long at the time) actually increased in value during the day. If you want to trade...

I traded with Schwab through 2008. They have a platform named StreetSmart Pro, which uses technology from Cybercorp, a daytrading firm they bought 10 years ago. I liked the platform. It was very intuitive and responsive (it had a memory footprint of around 18MB, so I never really experienced the...

What software are you using to view/save cboe charts?

It's certainly a negative, but not much of one. Investors lost $1B in the Abacus deal. Assuming the government wants GS to be on the hook for all of it, and trebles the damages because it's willful, they'll ask for $3B and will settle for a few hundred million and GS will not have to admit any...

I've exercised long options early in a couple cases. - when an option has such a low bid price (and is thinly enough traded) that I would have to sell the option for less than its intrinsic value. One time I had some options that were, I think, DJ 55 puts. When DJ got down to 50, I wanted to...