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Shorting stock is a risky and ill-advised move, only for experts, almost certainly a bad idea except for experts, yes, yes, I know.
still
With Tesla up a bit today, I wish I had a brokerage account already so I could short it for, say, one week out from now, just with a few symbolic bucks.
OK, screw it, I want to do this. I want to put a little money in TSLQ and TSLZ (which is a way of betting that Tesla stock will drop). Clearly nonsense as a financial plan; I’ll only put in an amount I’m willing to lose. This is just for symbolic reasons. I’m willing pay a few bucks to raise this middle finger.
Recommendations: What's a less-terrible place to open an account where I can trade individual stocks? It needs to be low overhead and low nonsense; there will only ever be at •most• a few hundred dollars involved.
@inthehands if you have a bank account somewhere that also owns a brokerage most have low cost/self managed trading options (for example if you bank with Bank of America you can open an account at Merrill Lynch pretty easily. May not be the most ideologically pure but may be easy if you already have the accounts.
(fewer credit unions or b corp banks have brokerages)
I'm reasonably happy with Charles Schwab but not sure their minimums but generally decent (relatively for their industry)
@Rycaut
I do have a Fidelity account through one old employer’s 401(k), and probably that’s the easiest. But I hate their web interface so much….
@inthehands if you have a 401k there you would probably need to open a separate account unless you wanted to actively trade in your 401k (which in some cases might be a possibility - though personally I've been boring in my retirement accounts) and hating their web interface is a very valid reason to look elsewhere. Schwab's interface is fine - but I haven't done much active trading with it - but I suspect most brokerages have tried for broad feature parity in recent years.
@inthehands @Rycaut huh, I tried out I think 6 different brokerages, and decided Fidelity was the best. There’s a few things Schwab does better, and it was a different one that allowed buying mutual funds by shares, but it was way better than most of the web interfaces
@inthehands @Rycaut right, I made my comparison public - https://mastodon.social/@ShadSterling/110763753963099232
Didn’t actually compare on how much I like the web interface
@ShadSterling
This is super useful, thank you!
@ShadSterling @inthehands thanks! Very useful. (Though I think Schwab has made some changes since you did the comparison - you can now do 2FA via their app not SMS for example. Unsure about dollar amounts for shares but I know you can own fractional shares at Schwab as I have some - though mostly I now buy mutual funds or ETFs. Also I know you can sweep cash into interest earning cash funds - but unsure what you meant by a cash only account ) also recently improved the time to clear most trades
@Rycaut @inthehands shortening the settling time was done by the SEC, it’s the same for all brokerages. I’m not going to re-evaluate my decisions any time soon, so I’m not going to update that link, but if you want to make your own updated version I’d like to put a link to it in my first tab. I don’t see a way to buy, e.g. 0.5 shares of SCHW, but dividend reinvestment and funds bought in dollars is in multiples of 0.001 shares
@Rycaut @inthehands I meant “cash account” that you can use like a checking account, with ACH transfers and debit cards; Schwab is a bank so has actual checking accounts, but you have to fill out another application every time; Fidelity has “Cash Management” accounts through a partner bank for the routing number, that you can create with little more than one click