Low Commission Broker, Where Art Thou???

Brokers who will not be taking our hard
earned commissions

In order to trade, you need a broker, and for our needs, we need a cheap one!  So that's the next step.  There are many brokers out there, and I really don't feel like boring everybody with all of the gory details, but we have decided to go with Options House.  The commissions are $4.95 a piece, they got fantastic reviews all over the internet, and their interface looks top notch.  I haven't seen the charting they supply yet, hopefully it's good, because I can't seem to find anywhere that suits my needs on the internet, for free.  

I'm sitting here watching the Steelers and Titans, and I love how guys are running kickoffs back that they are receiving 8 yards deep in the end zone.  Just something about it, change is tough, and not always good, I didn't think the new kickoff rule was going to help, at all, but somehow, I think it's a little better???  Shame about Al Davis dying, he's done alot for the game, but will this be better for the Raiders?  

Anyhow, we've decided on OptionsHouse, mostly because the commissions are low and we will be able to make all of the trades that we need, options, ETFs, Stocks.  And hopefully some decent charting software.  

So I think what's going to happen is that most of the conversation is going to be through email.  So what I'll probably end up doing is summarize the highlights from the email conversation at night about what's going on in the market.  We have about 2 days of email back and forth about details of various online brokers.  Commission rates, minimums, maintenance fees, what's available to trade...  But I think OptionsHouse will be the best of what we will be needing.  

What our $1700 will soon look like.  

Next step is going to be opening and funding of the account, which will hopefully happen tomorrow, and then decisions on what funds we're going to be watching.  So, next update, coming soon, with a discussion about ETFs, risk, indicators, and portfolio distribution.  

Oh, and it looks like we're going to be starting things off with $1750, we found a couple of other suckers, I mean investors.  Yeah, sure, investors....  

Go Buccaneers!!  

How it all Started

I walked into the Chicago Board of Trade on Jackson Ave., downtown Chicago, on September 2, 2001, and walked out for the final time sometime in February of 2008, that day wasn't quite as memorable.  In those 7+ years I learned alot, made alot, and lost alot, more than I made as a matter of fact.  And that day in February when I left for the last time, I didn't ever want to see a market to trade again.  Yep, that didn't last.

First day of work in the big city, where this story
has its beginning

Similar story for Adam, I'm sure we'll go into much more detail in the upcoming days and months, so just know that we were both there for pretty much 7 or so years and had similar successes and similar failures.  We worked all hours of the day and night, some good, some bad, some real bad.  And we met some interesting people along the way, some good, some bad, some real bad..... 

But here we are again, both have moved on to new careers, I'm in medical sales and Adam is in the athletic Department at a D-1 school.  And over the recent months we've had many conversations, mostly on BlackBerry Messenger, about our thoughts on the S&Ps, Employment, and economy in general.  And just last night, on another one of our BBM conversations, we came up with the following idea:

Let's get together $1,000 and see what we can do with it.  Sounds pretty simple, sounds like everybody has thought about this once or twice.  But we want to use what we learned in the trenches day trading, and what we've learned since looking at the market in a much larger picture, to see if we can make some sense out of any of it.  The plan is to be diverse, frugal, and smart.  We're going to take a chance when we feel it's the right move and we're going to leave everything in a cash account if that's the move.

Hopefully this works out the way we would like, we're going to blog about all of our decisions and thoughts.  We don't have much money to start with, so we need to make good decisions, because as we found out, the money seems to go alot quicker than it comes.  

Keep checking back, see how we're doing.  Should be fun.  Should be entertaining.  Should learn something.