I should have added one more heading to the web page below..that is concerning 'money management'. The web is awash with ads, gimmicks, olde wives tales and other signal programs to help you trade. Most of these ads will first remind you that 90% of traders going it alone fail. This may be true and I am not sure. In my experience, alot of novices fail because of poor money management. It is all about staying in the game for me. This in turns means looking at your money situation and trading wisely on your account. If your a day trader and like to get in and out fast, you will want to trade volatile stocks. Some of the miners are volatile right now following the ups and downs of the DOW while investors try to figure out if growth is slowing or the FED is nearing a pause etc. While I usually try to buy on dips, there will be times when you get caught out and the trade moves against you. To shield yourself against these kinds of errors you must ensure that you are not too exposed on your trade. You must give yourself the chance for your trade to recover if the share price moves say 3% against you. This is not to say that all stock prices recover. If you have traded right up to your credit limit and the share price moves against you, you will get a margin call in no time..You start to panic and get stressed and all good thought and plan goes out the window..You close your trade and you are out of the game..This only has to happen a few times before you are out of funds totally on your account. Therefore the moral of the story for all novices is to watch your money...trade well within your limit..give yourself plenty of leeway for things to go wrong...and try always to buy on a dip..Afterall most good traders will sell into strength after a day of good gains..Novices will buy on this strength ..hence buying at the top and then must watch while the trade goes against them..
Yeh, I think DMA is the standard for all active traders...If you trade less liquid stocks like JKX, you want to be able to get within the spread and buy at a cheaper price. at the time of writing this i can see u can buy @ 334.75 and sell @ 331. With DMA i can throw an order into buy @ say 331 and so I feel I have better chances to execute at a better price than quote driven systems.. If you are based in the UK , you have alot of different providers... idealing.com is one..they sell prepaid commission credits at a reduced price..so say u buy 200 pounds worth of comm credits from them , they will sell u these at a discount and effectively be charging you 8 or 9 basis points a trade no matter how much you trade a month..Worth checking them out if you are trading smaller lots.. I like etrade's platform but am going to check out other providers as I want to reduce my costs down further. And as I have mentioned before Equitrade can get you discounts if you use IG, man financial or etrade..
