Has anyone done any online stock trading? I would like to get into it myself but have no idea which site will be legit and wont require me to keep $5000 in the account lol, if you have can you post your experience and the site you used/site that was best for you.
Thanks and I just don't see why there isn't like world trade center online or nasdaq trading seems a bit useless to have a site that doesn't allow for stock trading :/
I'm an active futures trader and a finance major, so I'll try to address your post as best as I can.
Firstly, you need to understand what you're getting yourself into with active trading. Given your question, I'm going to assume that you're completely new to trading and encourage you to do a lot of research on the occupation before ever considering opening a trading account.
Like small businesses, short-term traders have a very high failure rate, especially stock traders. It's somewhere in the ballpark of 90-98 percent (depending on your source). Of those who don't blow away their capital, few are able to be consistently profitable and fewer still are able to derive a livable income off of their trading activity. My point: this is
not about easy money (although professional traders tend to make it look that way). It's a skill that takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to properly develop as well as a general understanding of market behavior and mechanisms. If you don't possess those two things, you're going to lose more money faster than you ever thought possible.
Secondly, you're never going to find a broker who lets you trade for free (unless its a demo account with fake money). For stocks, the minimum account balance is $25,000 for active day trading, as per regulations. For futures, the minimum depends on the contract but tends to be much cheaper when dealing with e-mini's (generally in the $2000-$5000 range). You can trade with smaller balances, but only in a long-term buy and hold capacity. There are also additional costs associated with short-term trading, including the data and platform fees. Minimum, you're looking at an additional few hundred dollars per month in bills. Commissions will also vary between brokers. As a client with Tradestation, my round-trip commission for futures is $2.40 per contract.
Thirdly, and I cannot stress this enough, you MUST thoroughly educate yourself on the difference between gambling in the markets and actually capitalizing on real opportunity. The function of these markets is specifically to transfer money from one account holder to another. This means they are competitive and that major market participants (institutional traders) are not going to be using mass-adopted trading strategies -- they will be taking the other side of those strategies to fulfill their order requirements. Because their analysis and expertise is by far superior anything marginal speculators are going to possess, trading these types of strategies is no different from playing an extremely expensive slot machine in Vegas. If you want to find a trading system that works, you're going to have to either spend a lot of time building and testing one or you're going to have to find a mentor who can teach you (I myself have been instructed by a couple of CME floor traders and several electronic traders). Moreover, you need to have a thorough understanding of risk, how to reduce it, and how to manage it. If you don't, it'll eat your account up like a 5yr old in a box of Oreos.
I realize this is a bit much than what you were asking for, but I've personally seen people lose (net) tens of thousands of dollars trying to trade these markets. Even successful traders lose (gross) money regularly. So, before saying "go out and do this", I'd rather you know what you're getting involved with first, because it sounds to me like you're in virgin territory. Hopefully you find this helpful.