Monday, January 21, 2013

Tasty Trade - Free Option Trading Education

Wdis
How many of you like FREE stuff?

Ok. Stupid question. How many of you like quality free stuff? If you are on this site, you are likely trying to make money trading options...and maybe other trading vehichles as well.

So Tasty Trade could put you back $90/month if you didn't know any better. But we would not let you do that on our watch. The first thing you need to know is that if you use the Think or Swim platform to trade then its free. Oh, by the way, Think or Swim from TD Ameritrade is not only the most sophisticated platform out there but its FREE also.

Now that you have this information, what are you going to do with it?

1) Go open up an account with TD Ameritrade and download the Think or Swim Platform.

2) Then once you account is set up and funded you are going to send an email to tastysupport@tdameritrade.com to get your free account at tasty trade setup.

Once you get your tastytrade.com account, you need to start tuning in and learning.

Don't forget to contact support and ask them to lower your commission rate. Just tell them you want them to match interactive brokers option rates. They may give you a spill...blah, blah, blah. At first they will likely offer you a $1.25/contract commission rate for options and a penny per share for stock. That is a good deal to start, and as your volume picks up you can go back to the table.

For full disclosure Jason, Sandeep, and myself pay $0.75/contract for options and a penny per share for stock trades. Its a great rate, especially when you keep your trades small. Which is really the way we recommend you trade.

Let us know if you open an account with TD Ameritrade and get the TastyTrade.com account. We have been on the trading platform for a while and can help if you need any navigating the platform. But you will also learn a lot of that from the show.

Good Luck Trading!

P.S. If you are just begining you should tune into the new series on tastytrade.com called "Where Do I Start?

Tom Sosnoff, the co-founder of ThinkorSwim and founder of TastyTrade.com is teaching his daughter from the ground up how to trade the financial markets and make money.

7 comments:

  1. I think the guidance Dominic has provided for new traders in the above post is the best advice anyone could give a new trader. Nice job.

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  2. Just trying to level the playing field out there for everyone. No reason for people to re-invent the wheel here. Learn from our experiences.

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  3. Nice Blog, Good information about tasty trade free option trading it is very informative
    and helpful. I always ready to read this type of blogs. Options Trading

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  4. I wrote TOS about lowering my commission costs but still haven't received a response. As it is, I don't see anyway you can trade 1 contract and be profitable when your cost per trade is 9.99 + 0.75 per option contract. That's ludicrous.

    One thing which concerns me about the Where Do I Start segment is that they don't disclose what Case is paying in commissions. I'm guessing all of her commissions are free because it is a new account. For the rest of us, that would never work.

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  5. I agree that paying a flat rate on top of a per contract fee makes it extremely difficult to trade profitably. This is the reason I switched to Interactive Brokers from Scottrade many years ago. I left Interactive for Think or Swim when I was able to get the same rate.

    Unfortunately the people with decision power at Think or Swim have moved on and I don't think their is as much bargaining power now that they are owned by TD Ameritrade. Its difficult for publicly traded entities to offer back door selective pricing to customers as forums like this will expose that and then every customer large or small comes asking for the lowest rate.

    I haven't visited Interactive Brokers site in a long time but from what I've heard their rates are still the lowest, there is no minimum, which means you can trade one option contract for something like .70 if you want to. However, the software platform sucks. What I used to do is open the Think or Swim Paper Money free platform and use that to analyze my trades and view charts etc., then I would just use Interactive to execute my trade.

    The sad truth is Tom would be the first to tell you that trading one contract at a time and paying a flat fee on top of it is something you shouldn't do, but he's in the business of getting people interested in trading and racking up commissions so he's not going to steer you away from that. If you're doing any kind of decent volume with TOS, you just threaten to sign ACATS and go to another broker. If you're not really doing a lot of business with them then you don't have bargaining power. If you are trading small then you have to search around for a more friendly broker that only charges contract fees.

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  6. Just to note a few of the people that I have been teaching have recently negotiated with TOS for $1.50/contract for option trades with no minimums. If you push hard enough they will negotiate. But Jason makes a good point about the fact that they are now apart of TD Ameritrade.

    But the retail customer has a lot more power now then they did just 5 years ago.

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