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It may sound like I am splitting hairs here, but this fine distinction makes trading difficult. We never know for certain that we have a positive mathematical expectancy. There are only varying degrees of uncertainty. And there is also the possibility that a system's expectancy can change...

How could you ever know that a system works? That it worked in the past doesn't mean that it will continue to work.

It is not very practical to use market orders with thin Nasdaq stocks, and a stop becomes a market order when elected. Depending on how anxious you are to do the trade, you are almost always better off working the order yourself.

I use CutePDF and love it: http://www.acrosoftware.com/

Last year the 1099 was off by $0.01, but this year it matched my records.

I took the Series 3 after reading Dearborn's book in 1996 and passed. It is as good as any.

I tend to agree with Cutten about risk management. As I recall, Richard Dennis had big equity swings and even blew out a public fund in the late 1980's. I read an interview with him later in which he said that he didn't want to manage public money anymore. I think that was because so few...

O.K., I see what you're doing. I agree that Webtrader does not work with Firefox. IB's primary trading client is TWS, not Webtrader, and TWS runs both standalone and under Firefox. As I understand it, the main difference between Webtrader and TWS is that TWS requires a Java Virtual Machine...

I tried this link in Mozilla 1.7.7, and it works fine. Maybe there is something wrong with your copy of Firefox.

Shorting SPY requires that your broker borrow shares, and some brokers have been having trouble finding sufficient numbers. There is nothing to borrow with ES and no margin interest to pay.

You're talking about scaling into a position here. I don't do it, but I know many people do. If I were to scale into a position, I would only add the later purchases if the earlier ones were making money. Don't do the first purchase until you think the time is right. If it loses money...

If a broker trades ahead of his client, it is called "front running" and is indeed illegal. If a broker were to tail a profitable client, it would be very much to the client's benefit. I would love to find some way to get my broker or anybody else to tail me.

I was a professional programmer before becomming a trader, but all my programming was on mainframes. I am salf-taught in PC programming. I made the decision in 1996 to learn Delphi, because it was about as fast and powerful as C++ but easier to learn. VBasic, version 4, was interpreted, not...

I think the browser-based version requires Java, and if you are using somebody else's computer, Java may not be installed. Even if it works, I wouldn't recommend trading from somebody else's computer because of security concerns.

Let us know what you find out. I checked this page on the IRS Web site: http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=139682,00.html According to Part 2, page 72, the fields on Schedule D (and all schedules, for that matter) are 12-byte numeric. If you include commas and a decimal part, the limit...

According to this discussion, the IRS has a limitation on field size for e-filing. If that is true, you cannot e-file even if your tax program allows larger fields.

TaxCut had such a restriction, but I have heard that it has been fixed. I am surprised to hear that TurboTax still has the bug. I switched to TaxAct for this very reason several years ago.

You might have a look at TradeMagic. I don't use it because I don't work with [dot]net, but it looks interesting. http://www.trademagic.net/

Does anybody know what a typical non-compliance penalty would be? How likely would it be for the IRS to impose a penalty for failure to include the detail in the initial filing (as distinguished from failure to respond to a request for detail)?

It depends on how much money a trader starts with and who it belongs to. In general, a blowup is a loss that 'forces' the trader to stop trading. Some traders are able to borrow more capital and get right back into the game, but most have to get a regular job. I don't consider a 30% setback...