Discount Brokers

A discount broker offers an execution service for a wide variety of trades. In other words, you tell them to buy, sell, short, or whatever, they do exactly what you requested, and nothing more. Their service is primarily a way to save money for people who are looking out for themselves and who do not

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Day Trading, Margin and Free Ride Rules

This article discusses the basic mechanics of day trading, the free-ride regulations, and explains how traders use margin accounts to avoid violating those free-ride regulations. Day trading is the term applied to people who buy and sell stocks through the course of a day, rarely holding a stock overnight. You might be wondering just what

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Brokerage Account Types

Brokerage houses offer clients a number of different accounts. The most common ones are a cash account, a margin account (frequently called a “cash and margin” account), and an option account (frequently called a “cash, margin, and option” account). Basically, these accounts represent different levels of credit and trustworthiness of the account holder as evaluated

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Bid, Offer, and Spread

If you want to buy or sell a stock or other security on the open market, you normally trade via agents on the market scene who specialize in that particular security. These people stand ready to sell you a security for some asking price (the “offer”) if you would like to buy it. Or, if

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After Hours Trading

After-hours trading has traditionally referred to securities trading that occurs after the major U.S. exchanges close. Until 1999, after-hours trading in the U.S. was mostly restricted to big-block trading among professionals and institutions. Much of this sort of trading was supported by electronic trading networks (ECNs). One of the oldest and best known ECN is

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Stock Trading

This article offers a very basic introduction to stock trading. It goes through the steps of buying and selling shares, and explains the fundamental issues of how an investor can make or lose money by buying and selling shares of stock. This article will simplify and generalize quite a bit; the goal is to get

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Selling Unregistered Securities

Under the U.S. Securities Laws, specifically The Securities Act of 1933, the mere offer to sell a security — unless there is an effective registration statement on file with the SEC for the offer — via the Internet can be a felony subjecting the offeror to a 5 year federal prison term. See the Securities

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Ken Roberts

This article is a response to a message saying that the Ken Roberts course is a good introduction to commodity trading (the message originated on an AOL site but was quoted on the Motley Fool investment site). According to one of the writers of that thread, Ken Roberts is now advertising on radio with ads

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Dave Rhodes and Other Chain Letters

Please do NOT post the “Dave Rhodes”, “MAKE.MONEY.FAST”, or any other chain letter, pyramid scheme, or other scam to the misc.invest.* groups. Pyramid schemes are fraud. It’s simple mathematics. You can’t realistically base a business on an exponentially-growing cast of new “employees.” Sending money through the mails as part of a fraudulent scheme is against

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Charles Givens

Charles J. Givens was a self-styled financial planner, investment educator, and investment guru who once appeared in info-mercials on late-night television to tell the world about the fortunes he had made and lost, free seminars run by his associates, and the Charles J. Givens Organization. He died in 1998, but one of his organizations, International

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