Originally posted by Kastro_316
Im kinding thinking between, Etrade or Datek, What does everyone suggest.
Thank you
I'm gonna offer you some very serious advice.
Firstly, I'm pretty sure that even you realise that the executions you are gonna get with Etrade are simply not suitable for making multiple day trades. Why then would you consider using them?
Secondly, I think at this stage of your career, choosing a broker ought to be way down on your list of priorities (not knowing what S&P Eminis are? please).
Thirdly, (and I mean this one nicely) stop asking everybody for their suggestions - especially in the way you've been asking for them, "what's better a or b?". You have to be way more specific then that. More importantly though, you need to develop a trait that I'm willing to bet most successful traders share, the ability to think independantly. The ability to analyze a given set of information and form your own judgement according to what's important to YOU, regardless of what anyone else thinks. (In trading and in life in general, eg issues like abortion, globalism.)
Go down to your local library and start from scratch. Read anything you can find that has to do with the stockmarket. Begin from the most basic, introductory literature. The more advanced the book, the more likely it is to be junk, but you've got to get a basic level of knowledge about the market before you even begin thinking about what style of trading you'd prefer to do. At this stage, you don't even know what you don't know. That's not meant to be insulting, it's something everybody goes through when learning something new.
Without $25k you are forbidden, by legislation, to make more than three daytrades per week. As you don't appear to have this sum yet, you are simply not going to be able to start just yet. I suggest saving up for it, and while saving continuing to learn.
Given that all this is likely to take quite a long time, here is my suggestion as to what to do in the mean time:
Get yourself access to some live data and just WATCH. Every day.
Once everything starts making sense, start paper trading. It is no subsitute for the real thing, but I believe you can closely approximate the feelings you'll go through in real life while paper trading. In my case, I paper traded for 6 months before I went "live". I paper traded exactly the way I intended to do it with real money, and I honestly felt the losses almost as hard as I did when I first used real money (losses don't bother me in the slightest anymore), so it can be a very valuable experience.
You'll probably have to work to save up the money, so you might wanna get a job that starts later in the day, or consider moving to the west coast (unless you're already there) so that you can at least watch the opening of the market (most hectic period) and still work a 9 to 5 if that's what you want.
I realise that what I've said probably isn't what you wanted to hear. Are you man enough to face reality for what it is (you lack funds, knowledge, skills)? Or are you gonna go off and live in some fantasy land, where the things I've mentioned don' t matter? That's for you to decide.
Daniel