Online Broker Review

Updated Saturday, May 21, 2011

Stock Trading Grade: B

CLICK HERE to switch to TradeKing and
get up to $150 in transfer fees reimbursed

Overview:

TradeKing offers a high quality trading experience. Buying and selling securities, both from the trade entry screen and from the portfolio view, is perfectly done. Canceling or modifying orders that have not yet executed is easy and works well.

Order Types:

See our Order Types page for an explanation of order types

Market
Limit
Market On Close
Stop Loss
Stop Limit

Details:

I made an order to buy 20 shares of the United States Oil Fund (USO) at a limit price of $29.07 (click on images for larger views):

I entered the order to be good until canceled. TradeKing does not specify, but this typically means 30-60 days until the trade is purged from a broker's system. If an order is entered with a limit price that is very far off from the last trade price, a warning is generated but trades can still be executed. This is exactly what I look for a trading engine to do. The next screen prompted me to verify my order:

My order was confirmed:

Once orders are entered, their status can be checked on the order status page. Before the trade executes, users can modify or cancel an order. Modifying or canceling orders works perfectly, with updated or canceled orders showing updating on the order status page immediately.

I decided to let my trade go through. Once the market opened and my trade executed, I could view trade details. Here I could see that the trade execution time to the minute, along with other information:

trade king trade executed with time shown

More details can be found on the official trade confirmations, which are generated the next business day.

I then viewed my holdings by going to the Account Holdings screen. From here, I decided to close out my position by selling my shares:

Clicking on the blue arrow and selecting trade brought up the trade execution screen. This auto populated the stock symbol, the transaction type to sell and the shares to the number of shares that I owned. This is all done very well.

TradeKing Video: Placing a Stock Order (provided by TradeKing):

TradeKing Stock Trading