Yes indeedy - it is a great thing as far as I'm concerned. They...

Yes indeedy - it is a great thing as far as I'm concerned. They were advertising here on HotCopper so I checked them out.

There is certainly the potential to trade like the big boys - it is only my skill that is holding me back now :-(

$19.50 is 60% of what I was previously paying for brokerage (and that was for each and every trade). There seems to be cheaper brokerage around (down to $15) but I can't see that you can do multiple trades on the one fee.

You can use "rapid-trader" which is web-based and currently has free live data until the end of the year. I use their "Market Analyser" which is a program installed on the computer. You trade with it but it can also do fancy market scans (most of which I'm still working out).

The market analyser gives me the irits a bit because it often stops responding and you have to end the process in task manager before it can be launched again. They are supposed to be fixing this in in the next release.

Also they occasionally mess up their records of what was sold and bought. Just today I had to ring them because their records showed I still had a holding in a stock that I actually cleared my position on yesterday. I just make sure I carefully check the confirmations emailed through at the end of each day - so far it has always been able to be fixed up easily enough. I don't give them a hard time about it, I need to be humble because of the times they have had to ring me about a settlement not going through due to lack of funds in the trading account :-)

I'm not quite sure why I'm mentioning all this. Only that I guess that's what HotCopper is for - sharing ideas that may help other traders.