After-hour Trading

You absolutely can place pre-market, after-market and Extended Hours trades.

Etrade has always had this feature/ability in their Power Etrade Accounts. The trading 'day' on Etrade's Power Etrade is thru INET, and it's from 8am - 8pm ET... that's 12 full hours open for trading.

If you can't qualify for Power Etrade, you can still see all the after market and pre market changes tick by tick on their regular platform live.

However, I totally agree with what's said here about it... it's a very dangerous way/time to trade if you don't know what you're doing. There's higher volatility (due to lower volume), wider spreads (due to lower volume), 'unlinked markets' (same stock trades at different prices depending on the trading system at the time).

Also, I once tried to get a fill on 1000 shares after hours and forgot to check all or none... OMG. I got filled... 100 at a time, with 10 commissions!!!

OOPS! I am editing... I just remembered that you CANNOT check All or None in extended trading.
 
hels02


Registered: Feb 2006
Posts: 37


11-07-06 06:41 PM

You absolutely can place pre-market, after-market and Extended Hours trade

did you leave out the words market order?
 
Well they should know it because even if you wanted to try it you will get an error message saying market orders are not allowed.
 
I don''t know what platform you are trading on but there should be a function which distinguishes AH orders from regular hours orders. Read the help that accompanies your platform. Ask your broker how it works.

And above all, be careful. The street is filled with trader's heads rolling about from careless or thoughtless AH trades.
 
Quote from hels02:

\Also, I once tried to get a fill on 1000 shares after hours and forgot to check all or none... OMG. I got filled... 100 at a time, with 10 commissions!!!
More...

If your brokerage charges you full commission on each partial fill, maybe it is time to go somewhere else.
 
I no longer have Power Etrade, just regular Etrade now, because I no longer day trade like I did in 1999 & 2000. My memory is a bit faulty about all the specifics, probably because I blotted most of it out:D . Back then, Power Etrade was the niftiest tool around, with Level 2, comprehensive research, a lot of free premium content, and an amazing software platform that could not be found elsewhere.

That's no longer true, over the last 6+ years, there's more and more software available, some free, and most brokerages offer low priced trades with premium content research. Back then, not many could offer Etrade's $4.99 trades, plus the entire package and software, which is why I did it. The only way to get it however was to daytrade, due to the huge trade minimums. At the time, I think it was 30 or 60 trades a month.

Market orders... I honestly don't remember with certainty, but you probably couldn't then, but who ever does market orders unless they pay more for limit orders (Brownco used to, and since Etrade bought them, charge $10 for limit and $5 for market, but no one would be crazy enough to place market orders AH). The spreads between ask and bid were sometimes really large AH.

I no longer trade AH, and see no need to (would have been nice to catch the huge spike in OSI after hours tho). The other nice thing about Power Etrade then, was the ability to get reserve placement on IPOs... no waiting for the opening. We could get up to 200 shares at the IPO release price. Back in 1999, that was an insane edge, when the difference between the offer price and what the IPO's did the second they hit the market due to pent demand. Most of the time, you could make a 400% profit for holding for 1 minute. That was as close to free money as you could get on the market.

I didn't joke about the commissions. If you don't get an all or none, you could get really weird fills, and they are all separately commissioned. NO, there was NO partial fill credits for after hours, and as I mentioned already, you didn't have an all or nothing option. But at the time, if you wanted to trade after or pre market (and back then, that was also quite an edge), you paid what they charged you because you couldn't get the features elsewhere.

I ended closing that account at Etrade, because they would do some shifty money accounting that I could never prove, and moving that account to BrownCo, which had great rates and tools also (but not the software). Irony of ironies, that account is back at Etrade... because they bought BrownCo last year. :mad:
 
Keep something in mind, I don't know 1/2 the terminology I read on this forum, because I'm just an ordinary retail investor. I don't trade for a living, tho I've done pretty well overall (after suffering some serious hard lessons in 2000-2003). This is not my profession or my life, it's just a hobby.

I found this forum because I was looking into cheaper options trading, and found ThinkorSwim, who has a really nice options software (which I still don't fully know how to use). So I have a little account with ThinkorSwim... among other brokerages, because they all offer different premium features. Are all of you traders by profession?
 
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