I was pissed today.
Not because of any bad trading decisions. Overall I made good decisions.
I was pissed at things beyond my control.
I’m pissed as I write this.
The Humble Beginnings of My Pissiness
I’ve been in the process of moving my trading from my personal trading accounts to an entity account. There are a number of benefits to doing this if you trade full time. You can learn about those benefits here.
It takes time to open new accounts and move money over. Missing trading days because of that can cost me profits. To minimize disruption in my trading, I decided to move it over in chunks. I would move over some to the entity account while keeping some in the personal account to continue to trade. Once I could trade in the entity account, I could finish any remaining open trades in the personal account, close it out, and move the remaining funds over.
Thanks a Lot, Chase
The entity account was ready on April 20th. However, to move money into an entity account, you need to have a business checking account under the name of the entity. I was in the process of opening one with Chase. For some reason there was a nearly two week delay. I had called Chase repeatedly and kept getting different stories. Finally after two weeks someone told me there was a glitch in their system for people who applied for multiple products (I applied for checking and savings) and I would need to withdraw my application and re-apply.
Needless to say I was already frustrated, but it didn’t interrupt my trading as I hadn’t even had the opportunity to move any money yet. I got the entity checking account open on Friday May 1st. I wired about 2/3 of my money from my Vision personal trading account to the business checking account (I couldn’t do a direct wire from the personal account to the new entity account as they have different names). I then tried to get a wire back out to fund the entity account before the cutoff time on Friday. However, when I put in the wire info, Chase had a message that the wire recipient would need to be reviewed.
So much for the capability of wires to send money quickly.
Et Tu, Sterling?
Monday morning rolled around and the wire recipient was approved. I quickly wired the funds from the business account to the new entity account. I notified my account manager at Vision that I had wired the money and they could start getting my Sterling Trader Pro login set up for me. In the past, the login setup as usually been fairly fast…usually by end of day. During this time, I had a couple open positions in my personal account, and some remaining capital in my Tradezero personal account if I needed it. I figured I’d be up & running by early this morning at the latest.
Well, it’s now almost the end of the trading day and I’m still not set up. I contacted my account manager and he had tried to get Sterling to put me at the top of the priority list but not no avail…apparently they’ve had system issues and have tried to prioritize those. I couldn’t trade anything in my personal Vision account as all the funds were tied up in a couple trades I had held over from Monday. My funds in my Tradezero account weren’t enough to take full positions in the trades I wanted to take today. I’ve missed trades in LBTYB, MTP, and MVIS…all which would’ve been very profitable trades.
The strategic plan to avoid any delays didn’t work, and it cost me thousands of dollars in profits.
That’s life, though. No matter how well you plan, shit happens. The market will always be there and there will be plenty of more trading opportunities.
I’m still pissed though.
No matter how well you plan, shit happens…
Howdy, James! I’m curious how trading direct with Vision Financial is — I have an account at Centerpoint Securities with clearing/custody at Vision. I imagine the only thing different would be hard to borrow stocks coming from a different source? I know a number of short day-traders that are trading at Cobra Trading and are very happy with them. Could you for example see what MVIS borrow cost is today? At CP/Vision it is $0.013 per share (and has been since the open).
Hey, Michael, 3rd party borrows are through Velocity just like Centerpoint. I just grabbed a quote for MVIS and it showed 0.017.
I’ve been very happy trading direct through Vision. In fact, it’s been better than Centerpoint. I don’t get charged the ridiculous 4x overnight borrow charges. So only overnight charges are just short interest as you would have with anyone. I was also able to open a Vision account back in January of 2019 when I didn’t have enough capital to open a Centerpoint account. I think my initial account was around $8K. I was under the PDT of course at the time, but that was fine (I had an account with Vision, one with IB, and one with Tradezero which gave me 9 day trades per week). I would’ve never been able to do that with Centerpoint.
If you ever want to open an account directly with them, I can give you the contact info of my account manager.
I did have an account at Cobra for a period of time in 2019. For some reason I wasn’t trading well in it…I think that was more probably random occurrence than anything. I eventually closed it. Right now I’ve got Vision and Tradezero. Between the two I’ve been able to get a borrow on just about anything. There’s only been a few instances where I couldn’t. Only disadvantage of Tradezero is the ridiculous 7x overnight borrow fees. So I use Tradezero sparingly and only when I can’t get a borrow at Vision.
If I ever start to run into borrow issues though, then I’ll probably re-open Cobra to go along with my other accounts.
Thanks so much!