T.Y.BMS E-Finance
HARDIK SHAH Page 62
Germany, France, and Switzerland. In most cases online trading in the US
is still limited to the US markets, unless special arrangements or alliances
are concluded with other international ventures, or individual
subsidiaries, are established in local markets. To offer customers
international access, it becomes necessary to create separate subsidiaries
to deal in those markets.
Features offered by most online trading platforms include real-time
quotes, trade execution, research alerts, IPO access, portfolio tracking,
stock filtering, financial planning, position updates, buying power
notification, trade history, profit and loss accounting, multiple account
access, and headline news. Trade execution modules typical1y let
investors select the type, of buy/sell order desired, including limit orders
(executing at a specified price), market orders (executing at the prevailing
price), marketable limit orders (executing at no worse than the price
specified), good-till-cancelled orders (keeping an order "alive" until it is
executed or cancelled), till-or-kill orders (tilling the entire order or none
at all), and so on.
Day trading, in which investors execute dozens, or hundreds, of trades in
the hope of capturing small spreads, has been in existence since the early
1980s. Most "professional" day traders, who typically trade in 500-1000
share blocks, have historically relied on electronic direct access trading
(EDAT) platforms that include dedicated communications lines,
guaranteed instant access to a marketplace and rich, real-time quotes.
Certain dedicated retail bond trading services have also emerged,