Can you tell me if your trading platform is available to Canadian citizens. I am interested in selling put and call options.

Thank you,
Teresa

Could anyone please send me an invitation to get some free money?

“Customers are considered as engaging in Pattern Day Trading if they execute four (4) or more stock or options day trades within a five day period in a margin account. That is buying and selling (opening and closing) a position in the same business day.

TRADEKING DOES NOT PROMOTE DAY TRADING. If a customer engages in day trading, the following rules apply.”

Then it goes on to say that if you get this dreaded designation, you can’t trade without $25,000 in your account.

Now, I don’t know that I would actually make that many day trades, but it’s possible, and I had no idea that limitation existed. My guess is that a frequent trader might want to check out another service.

If you’re new to trading, a buy-and-hold investor, or a very casual trader who opens and closes positions only a few times a month, then TradeKing is not so bad. They do have a decent collection of trading tools (mostly for options traders) as well as some helpful research and analysis sections on their site. But majority of these tools and information is accessible elsewhere on the web for free anyway. There’s also a discussion forum on their site, but majority of the discussion on their boards was never too useful in my opinion. The status of your orders and daily trading activity is listed on their main page, along with your positions. It’s fairly basic and simple…pretty good for retail and novice investors who casually trade.

On the other hand, for those of you who trade frequently and are active traders throughout each week like me, TradeKing’s platform is terrible in my opinion. Every vital trading screen is laid out on separate web pages. You really have to open up multiple web pages from TradeKing’s site at the same time if you’re planning on trying to make quick moves. To make a trade, you have to wait for a web page to load, fill out the fields, and then submit the trade. You can keep clicking on a refresh button on the bottom of the order page to see a realtime bid and ask of the security you’re trading, but that’s about it. Then once the trade is placed, you have to wait for another page to load to see confirmation. Then you have to either go to an orders screen, or back to the main page to check on the status of your order. It’s all on separate pages and becomes very annoying at times…instead of all being in one spot. But the fun doesn’t stop there. In the event that you want to cancel or edit a trade, there’s no quick 1-2-3 method for doing so from any particular page either. You have to go to your order, and then wait for another web page to load and then make your changes. Their web-based charts are mediocre as well…you’re better off using Google’s charts in my opinion.

While it’s true that we live in the broadband era where loading pages takes mere seconds, but when you’re caught in the heat of the moment, the ability to edit and/or cancel your trades on TradeKing’s web based platform is far slower compared to other web based platforms from other brokers. And this has cost me money before…more than once. I know it’s unfair to compare a web based platform to a streaming java based platform, but there are other brokers out there who also use web based platforms too, and they are far more efficient than what you get with TradeKing.

Speaking of streaming platforms, TradeKing does actually offer one for real time quotes, but you have to make 25 or more trades or more per month or they don’t allow you to access it. That’s pretty disappointing when real time quotes are basically free these days. But the thing that is truly disappointing about their streaming platform is that TradeKing doesn’t let you make trades straight off of the platform since it’s provided by a third party. This means that while you can use the streaming platform for getting real time information, when you click buy or sell from the streaming platform, you are sent back TradeKing’s web site for making the actual trades. Again, for a lot of traders, this isn’t a big deal. But after 2 years of trading on TradeKing, it did become a big deal for me. I wasted a lot of time waiting for cancels and edits to go through while trying to catch the best price on positions I was trying to enter and exit, and missed them several times. In fact, the final trade I made with TradeKing that caused me to give up on the broker, was one where I was trying to get myself into an options position right before the stock exploded at open, but since there was no way to quickly edit the quantity of contracts and price, I ended up getting into the trade at a significantly higher price than I could have, and only ended up making 30% on that trade instead of double my money. That was the last straw for me. I don’t know…maybe it’s just because of the way my trading style evolved during this recession, but I completely gave up on not having a quick 1-2-3 trading platform.

One last thing. I believe the reason why most people switch or use TradeKing is because of their low price commissions. This was initially the reason why I chose them. The $4.95 they charge for each stock trade is not bad, and neither is .65 cent per contract for options trading. That may sound pretty inexpensive, but the broker I moved to charges $2.95 for stock trades and a FLAT RATE of $9.95 for options trades, regardless of the number of contracts you buy or sell, which is a lot better than TradeKing’s .65 per contract rate, especially when you trade a large quantity of option contracts like I do.

If you’re really looking for the lowest commissions, Optionshouse beats TradeKing hands down, and their web based platform is much faster and more responsive. Trademonster is also a cheaper broker for options contracts, as they only charge .50 per contract, and their web platform streams every piece of information on the screen in real time as well.