Quote from stock777:
I checked the date on domineaux's post, and sure enough it was today.
Sure had me fooled, I thought I was looking at a post from 1996.
Well, you aren't too far off.
I quit trading in August 2001 when the trade regs were changed to 25K maintained account balance and 4:1 margins. The in-house brokers were all stringent to follow that policy and now I notice things have changed quite abit since many of the brokers have created some workarounds. I'm not sure exactly how it's done, but I'll research it until I understand it.
I traded with Protrader using the GR8 software and the darn software kept letting me violate the reg T. I was constantly having to replenish my account to meet the calls. I got paid zip interest so I was always moving money in and out of the account.
When the trading requirement went to 25K I knew I'd probably wind up pushing 3 times the money into the account constantly to keep up the the reg T shortfalls.
During the past month I've been taking another look at trading the intraday as before. Things have changed for sure. Now trade commisions (appear to be) about half the price I paid then.
I experienced a myriad of issues trading in-house, and by gosh if I'd traded at home I would have lost my lower extremities.
The in-house support was critical. The darned ECNs and Island would go down without warning and if the Protrader didn't have broker sitting on each row with a direct line to get executions for traders they'd have lost all their traders. As it is the pressure must have been pretty tough, because Protrader sold out shortly after I hung it up. Don't get me wrong... I wasn't a world class trader, just one of the boys banging the keys doing a pretty decent job of staying in the black most of the week.
If your response was a kind of sarcastic putdown that's fine with me. If the situation is nowhere near what it was then...I might get excited about trading again. I sure as heck am not going into it again like the neophyte I was with my money in my hand.
The greatest learning lessons are acquired from experience, and learning from others willing to share. I sure as heck won't forget my previous trading experiences.
I traded over my DSL connection at home with DLJ, A.B.Watley, and lost on many trades. I even tried the Protrader GR8 software to the local Protrader office and lost money, because of execution issues.
Every trade from home still had to go to a server that connected to the ECNs over the DSL connection and it just wasn't fast enough. My connection speed is still the same today as it was then. When I traded with Protrade In-house that connection to the ECNS was like a direct wire to the server...bam you could get off trades ahead of the pack time after time.
The only way I see that could be improved would be if home traders had a direct connection via the DSL to the ECNs. I wouldn't think that was possible for security reasons and for broker accounting and clearing.
It won't bother me for anyone to straighten out my thinking on the current situation.
As it stands now... I'll trade intraday only with a competent in-house broker.
I'll do a few trades from home, but I'll never try to trade hard and fast intraday from home... as I see it now.
