Need recommendations for stock trading tools

[Pete]

My elderly father recently entered a nursing home, and I've been trading his portfolio for him. The situation is that if I don't earn him some money, the cost of his care will eat everything up in a few years, so I might as well be aggressive. I have not personally been active in the market for years, but now have the time to do this for him.

I'm not a day trader, but I do like to trade at temporary tops and bottoms. As we all know, an awful lot can happen in fifteen minutes at critical times, so the Yahoo finance pages aren't quite cutting it for me.

Here's my wish list:

Real-time quotes and charts
Display of order book and streaming trades
A decent news feature
Notifications to cell phone (I'll probably buy a PDA)

I don't mind paying for quality information, but don't need a lot of bells and whistles.

Can anyone suggest a good quote service for me?

 

[freshjiva]

Pete,

All of the major brokerages (TD Ameritrade, Scottrade, ETrade, etc) provide pretty good realtime quotes and news. TD Ameritrade even has their own application for Android smartphones.

I personally use Ameritrade for my trading. They have great tools for realtime charting, screening, technical analysis, and also have a realtime newsfeed. They provide pretty much all the trading tools you need, and its free! All you have to do is sign up for an account.

Scottrade and ETrade also have some really nice tools.

Bottom line: if you're willing to do your own research, then the tools and data your brokerage provides you should be more than enough. However, if you're looking for stock recommendations, ratings, and research, then you'll probably have to open up a subscription at one of the various stock research companies like Zacks.com, Edward Jones, Morningstar, or a few others.

 

[Pete]

I am using Ameritrade, and it has a lot of nice tools for sure. I am just looking for something that will display real-time information without a lot of refreshing. Seeing the ticker and the order book would be cool, too.

Thanks for replying!

 

[lester1/2jr]

The situation is that if I don't earn him some money, the cost of his care will eat everything up in a few years, so I might as well be aggressive.

famous last words my friend. be very careful and don't go out on the margins! You could do worse than buying a stock with a good dividend and sitting on it. it will certainly be easier when tax times comes anyway. Heineken and Bayer are both good. Vale in brazil

 

[Zippyjuan]

Nobody will know when a top or bottom is happening until it is already over. If this is money you need (and it certainly sounds like it is) you do NOT want to be playing the market. Might check instead into some annuities. When you have a long time horizon you can ride out drops in asset values but in this case, if you lose, you lose big and don't have time to recover. Consider what you are doing.