Choosing An App For Day Trading
If you're looking to get into mobile day trading of stocks, you'll need a good app that will help you keep profits high and stress to a minimum. You can try out different apps, of course, although that may mean you'll need to pay for multiple accounts, so the sooner you find one that you love the more money you can save and the faster you can get down to brass tacks with your day trading. Here are some tips for choosing an app to support your new day trading habit.
Check for core features first
Shiny bonus features are great, but it's important to remember that the different types of stock market investments have very different needs. If you're doing day trading, your trading model will include lots of small trades with many different stocks. So you'll need to start with the basics that you absolutely need for day trading profits, such as:
- An app/account that has very low fees per trade (since you'll have small margins)
- An app that offers lots of resources and education about different stocks (since you'll need to make good decisions on high volumes of trades)
- Low minimums, especially per-month minimums (since you'll be doing many small trades and don't want to get hit with a fee for not doing bigger ones)
Calculate whether the fee schedule will work for you
Some accounts have inactivity fees, low balance fees, trading fees, and other fees that can add up to much more than you're making, especially at first when you're just finding your feet in the day trading world. For this reason, it's sometimes better to start out small with a free, no-fees account and then work your way up from there once you've decided which additional features you really need.
Avoid systemic problems
If you're trading in large volumes of stocks for small profit margins, you'll really need to have an app that responds instantaneously when you want to make a trade, or you could miss your window of opportunity. It also needs to respond instantaneously to stock market updates so you aren't working with a lag. In addition, you'll want to avoid accounts and apps that place volume restrictions on your trades and you'll also want to make sure that you don't end up with a broker or account that puts a "surcharge" on low-value stocks, which is another way to inadvertently lose your profit margin. You're probably in this for the money (unless you just like trading for the thrill of it), but so are many of the companies that offer day trading platforms for your mobile.
These tips will help you choose a day trading app that works for your purposes and isn't tied to an account or broker that will eat all your profits alive.