How can I make sure my account funds in ToS do not get vaporized? Should I only be registered to trade options and not have a margin account?

Obsidian, You make a great point that for every seller there has to be a buyer who is willing and who has cash to buy. That's so true and it probably would result in massive bankruptcies and people having their savings vaporized.

But can you say that the Fed won't interfere in the market before that happens? They have unlimited amounts of cash to buy with. Isn't that what they do with the bonds now? They let special market participants buy and then they take them off their hands. Isn't that what they did with the bad mortgage securities? I would kind of think that something would be done to stop everyone's savings from being vaporized in a day. That something will then lead to massive inflation but I don't know who is more dangerous, someone who has just seen their life savings get vaporized and has nothing left or someone who has a hope that they just might be able to outrun inflation.

There was a great line in the movie The Hunger Games. The head dictator guy said something about being able to control people as long as they have a bit of hope. Once that hope is gone you don't have control over them anymore.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=PNSN

Is PNSN about to (officially) go BOOM?

Kinda looks like it doesn't it?

Hahaha...if they aren't going under it is the buy of the millenium.

Looks like Ann Barnhardt is saying the same thing.

http://barnhardt.biz/

Well, there's one thing I can thank TDA for - moving TOS users away from pension.

Yep, down another $.06 - $.07 today (20%) on ~2.2X avg daily volume.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=PNSN

Days range says it hit 16 cents, ouch.

Karl,

I pulled my funds out of OptionHouse which was using PNSN for clearing. Interestingly I got a message from them the other day that they switched from Penson to Apex Clearing Corp. I tried researching what that company was about and found that they share the postal address of Penson: http://www.apexclearing.com/contact/ Interesting...

Does anybody know a good options broker that has reasonable rates for small trades (<100 contracts)?

Markus: Depending on how much volume you trade over a month, TOS/TDA will give you substantial discounts on commissions.

Interactive Brokers is a zillion times cheaper than TOS. I have no idea why more people do not trade at IB. I should have switched ages ago.

Holy ****, Ram, I did not realize how much cheaper IB is. Yes, switching ASAP makes very much sense.

Interest cost is ridiculously cheaper as well.

IB is more of a professional level platform. It's nowhere near as intuitive as TOS is.

Not to say it's not good. Once you get used to it, you'll probably love it.

If people want to pay way more to use a nice graphical interface, that is their choice I guess. The learning curve is definitely worth climbing at IB because you can trade so many more products, and the commissions are so much lower.

As long as you can get your order in as you intend to, who cares about the rest. If you can save that much in commissions, it's a deal breaker. I'm switching now. Of course I'll still use TOS for charting. Kind of like how Best Buy is Amazon's showroom.

I still give TOS some business. IB does charge more if you want to trade a ton of shares in a low priced security, whereas TOS has a fixed price so if you are flipping thousands of shares of penny stocks regularly, it is good to keep a TOS account open too.

Sometimes TOS has borrow to short stocks that IB does not have as well--though generally IB is pretty good about having shorts available.

I've never found out how to buy/sell options on IB if they are more than 5 out of the money.

Might be possible, but I can't find it.

Yeah, you have to bring up the optionstrader screen for ease of use trading options stuff. You can find all the strikes/months there pretty easily. The default method is a little counterintuitive. Similarly, you can trade FX there (with insanely good spreads), but it is better to use the FX trader screen, cause the default method takes a little getting used to.

You can manage everything from the portfolio screen, and I think I will end up liking that better, but it is good that they have stuff like the option and fx trader screens as crutches while I get accustomed to their platform.