Getting The Most From Ameritrade

I usually trade 2000-5000 shares at a time, which comes down to 0.2-0.5 cents per share, better than most per share offers.

Another sweet feature of Ameritrade is free wires out, both domestical and international. Of course it matters only to profitable traders :)

They finally fixed most bugs left over after painful Datek integration, I haven't called their tech support for months now.

As to the fill quality, it's like religion. Every broker (every nation) says our execution (our god) is better, and it's impossible to verify.
 
Referring to the long, medium and short terms discussed above in drawing correct trendlines, this is Sperandeo's criterion to determine the change in trend:

1. The trend must be broken – prices must cross the trend line drawn on the chart.

2. Prices must stop making higher highs in an uptrend, or lower lows in a downtrend. For example, in an uptrend after a minor sell-off, prices may rise again, but fail to carry above the preceding high point or barely break the high and then fail. The converse would happen in a downtrend. This is often described as a “test” of the high or low point, and usually, but not always occurs when a trend is in the process of changing. When it doesn’t occur, price movements are almost always driven by important news that causes prices to gap up or down and move erratically with relation to the “normal” price movement.

3. Prices must go above a previous short term minor rally high in a downtrend, or below a previous short-term minor sell-off low in an uptrend.

At the point where all three of these events have occurred,
there exists the equivalent of a Dow Theory confirmation of a change of trend. Either of the first two conditions alone is evidence of a probable change in trend. Two out of three events increases the probability of a change of trend. And three out of three defines a change of trend.

That's it. Hope some of this might be useful to Ameritrade users in seeing the short term trend changes at least.

Geo.
 
I noticed in today's Wall St. Journal that Ameritrade has create a new division - Ameritrade IZone.

Margin accounts only. Means no IRA's etc. No phone to customer support. Must have two years internet brokerage experience.

Equities $5 per trade, no size limit, market or limit orders still $5. Options not a bargain.

You pay for realtime quotes, news, etc, etc. Looks like a modified version of FreeTrade.

Depending on your trading volume the savings in commission ($5 vs $11) might be worth paying for the quotes, etc.

www.ameritradeizone.com
 
Quote from Trader5287:

Several of the big US indexes traded down near their 50 week moving averages last week. I can't get that feature of Datek charts to work right
More...
Are you talking about Streamer Charts? They're intraday only, with bars ranging from 1 min - 30 min, so if you want a moving average on the order of days or weeks you need to configure it to use a correspondingly larger number of periods. Better just to use bigcharts.
 
Quote from JackR:

I noticed in today's Wall St. Journal that Ameritrade has create a new division - Ameritrade IZone.


www.ameritradeizone.com
More...

I read in the offer fine print that this type of account is not available to current Ameritrade clients. If that is the case, I would have to close my current Ameritrade account before signing up.

I could not tell from reading the offer if I could open and use this type of account without signing up for Streamer. I have not been able to get Streamer to work properly and would not use it.
 
Got a note from an ETF enthusiast who pointed out that Streamer Charts will take up to 3 symbols though the format changes to a percentage relationship between them as obviously it can't show the price of each. I guess I missed this feature in the old Streamer or it wasn't there. As everyone knows, we are on the new site now.

Incidentally, I'm not happy with that new site not spawning its own java command box so that you now have to keep an IE or whatever you use page open - it's too easy to shut your charts or other streamer feature you are using off by accident.

Geo.
 
Thought I'd update this in the wake of TD Bank taking over.

If you have ample screen space and need a LARGE number of charts or mini charts, I was unable to find any quote service that rivaled Datek - Ameritrade - and so on. Think I pretty much tried them all.

Before TD took over, you could set up just once a week and leave your machine on which was great because it's a time consuming and annoying job.

TD now shuts you down every night via a log in mechanism.

There is no alternative solution out there in the market at this time to my knowledge.
 
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