Review of TradeKing's Stock Trading Platform

What Stock & Option Traders Can Expect of Online Broker TradeKing

Jul 19, 2009

A wide variety of stock screeners, option calculators, market research, and technical analysis tools await investors with online brokerage firm TradeKing.

Online stock and option trading firm TradeKing offers a surprising array of tools to help investors find trades, manage their accounts, and weigh opportunities. The trading platform even analyzes ETFs and mutual funds. Here's a closer look at TradeKing's key features.

TradeKing Pricing

TradeKing's commission structure is simple as wall as economical. All stock trades are $4.95 per transaction, while all option trades cost $4.95 per transaction plus $0.65 per contract. Broker-assisted trades don't cost anything extra.

Option spread traders- even those that trade the so-called 'exotics'- will find TradeKing's trade entry interface very simple to use. The one-screen process effectively 'walks' a trader through each leg of a multi-legged trade, asks about any price parameters (debit, credit, market, etc.), asks about the trade order's duration (day or GTC), and then confirms the order before sending it to the exchange.

Option traders will also enjoy the option strategy scanning tool, which helps users find various spreads, strangles, straddles, collars, and more.

The interface even allows 'contingent' option orders, meaning an underlying stock or index must meet a certain criteria before the option trade is placed.

For traders using technical analysis to make buy/sell decisions, TradeKing's features are adequate. All of the primary technical indicators are featured in the online charting platform.... MACD, relative strength, stochastics, Bollinger bands, and others are offered. The charts are also presented on screen quite crisply and cleanly.

TradeKing's charting does not offer custom-built indicators and trading signals like some of the more-established charting services do. On the other hand, almost all of those advanced charting services come with a hefty price tag- TradeKing's charts are free.

(Note that the TradeKing charting and scanning features are not software-based, but browser based, utilizing Java in most cases.)

The TradeKing service does offer, however, a 'technical event' screener. Any particular chart pattern or technical indicator scenario a trader can imagine can be 'found' through the system's trade search option.

TradeKing Account Management

TradeKing's account management options may be one of the very most robust sets of services of any online trading brokerage firm, including the more expensive top tier (and frequently at an additional cost) services.

Customers have access to the Maxit Tax Manager (powered by Scivantage). The Maxit Tax program automates everything in addition to making the appropriate adjustments for stock splits and mergers. A review of realized and unrealized gains is always available, and Schedule D's are automatically generated.

All trading activity is archived, and all of it is available for downloading into programs such as Quicken or Microsoft Money.

Trading Research, Ideas, and Community

Though a handful of other online trading firms have tried it, TradeKing's trading community is not only one of the biggest and most active, but it also offers an enormous amount of valuable information to traders and investors seeking new ideas and opinions.

Members of the 'Trader Network' community (membership is free) can examine what other traders are buying and selling; members can also choose to look at the trades being taken by just the community's most profitable traders. For those customers who are so inclined, their actual trades can be posted- anonymously or not- for others to consider.

TradeKing does not offer research 'reports' such as those created by Standard & Poor's. However, most all the relevant information, fundamental and otherwise, can be found through the site.

TradeKing offers tools and services on par with nearly all of its bigger and more established online brokerage competition. Considering the firm's pricing is far superior to that competition, TradeKing could be a smart choice for almost all market participants.