RamtaJogi— Hacking Life for Money and Fame.

How do you make sure that I am not, pardon the language,  bullshitting you? Simple. I will use Covestor. Covestor is a fantastic site which can connect to your broker’s system and verify that you are making the trades you say and whether you are able to turn profit or not. Here’s my profile.

Next, I also wanted to note down my thoughts for each trade. This would help me look back and see whether I am improving or not. Here’s the the link to my trading journal. This link will be permanently available from the top menu. [Techie note: I have been wanting to use DabbleDb for the longest of time and finally got the opportunity. What do I think of DabbleDb? They have made a kick ass application.]

My first reaction after looking at the journal? Well, commissions can really add up. So far, I am -12$ in my trades but adding commissions, I am down by almost 60$! I think one problem was that after my initial setback with ABK, I decided to trade too small an amount (e.g. only 400$ for SFI). I think I need to trade at minimum 700$ and not more than 1000$ on a single trade.

On a side note, TOS offers both per share commission and flat fee trading at $9.95. Sometimes, per share commission is cheaper than flat fee. The good thing is that they automatically chose the model which results in lower fees. It is very nice of TOS to optimize the commissions for their customers and not for themselves. +10 in my book. Let me also say that TOS has FANTASTIC support. I had couple of questions in last two days and I logged in to their online support chat. Not only do I get to speak an agent in less than 5 minutes, if my question is trade related, they forward my question to an experienced trader. Generally, in support systems, when you get forwarded, you have to tell your story from the beginning to the new guy, not at TOS! They also forward the actual query and the trader simply answers the question instead of asking you the question again. Simply superb. Just based on the experience of last 2 days, I think they have created a life long customer out of me.