Scottrade’s Scottrader Streaming Quotes Look Good

I have been a Scottrade customer for more than 8 years. As a long time user, I am glad to see that Scottrade keeps introducing new or improved products to its customers. This time, it’s the Scottrader Streaming Quotes tool, with more enhanced features.

As I mentioned in my broker web-based trading platform comparison post a while ago, though all  discount brokers offer real-time quotes through user’s web account, not many of them have streaming quotes, which means that with these brokers, you will have to manually refresh in order to get the latest stock quotes, which isn’t really convenient if you want to place a market order.

Scottrader is Scottrade’s streaming quotes  tool which allows you to get real-time quotes of both stocks/ETFs and options. Even though the Scottrader itself looks like to be a standalone tool, it actually is a web application from what I can tell because the tool can only be launched from within the account.

What’s convenient with Scottrader is that you can trade stocks, whether they are securities you already own or want to own, right from the tool, eliminating the need to go back to the web trading platform to place an order, which is the only way to trade for many other discount brokers. With Scottrader, you can either view your positions, or create a list of stocks you want to watch (you can have up to 40 stocks in the watch list, which can be created at the web and imported into Scottrader).

But getting real-time streaming quotes isn’t the only function of Scottrader. You can also do research with it, even though you don’t have as many functions as you have with ScottradeELITE, Scottrade’s true standalone trading platform. With the Chart tool, you can draw charts with frequencies from 5-minute to monthly, add trend lines, and compare the price chart with such indicators as Simple Moving Average or Linear Regression Line, etc. If you want do more comprehensive research, you can also go back to your Scottrade web account from Scottrader to access more stock, ETF, or mutual fund research tools.

You can also access latest market news from Dow Jones News through Scottrader and see most active stocks (in volume, price change, and price change percentage) on NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, and Options markets.

As I mentioned above, Scottrader isn’t really a standalone tool. To use it, you need to download a small file from within your Scottrade account. It’s a Java web start file (with .JNLP file extension) that’s used to Java programs on the web. From my experience, it seems that every time you want to run the program, you have to download it again, even though you have downloaded it before. I tried to run the one I downloaded and it always gave me an error like “Your session has expired. Scottrader will now close. Please log into the web site again to start a new Scottrader session.” Even after I logged into the my web account, the program gave me the same error and didn’t run, unless I downloaded the file again. Nonetheless, Scottrader is still a very convenient tool, especially if you don’t want keep going back to your web account and refreshing the screen to get the latest prices.

BTW, if you are interested in getting a Scottrade account, here’s how you can get 3 commission free trades.

Related posts:

1. Google Followed Yahoo in Offering Real-Time Stock Quotes
2. Scottrade Trading Platform Review
3. Called Ameriprise, Got Auto & Home Insurance Quotes Plus a Hard Credit Pull
4. ChoiceTrade: Another Discount Stock & Options Broker
5. Firstrade Trading Platform Review

Original Post on The Sun’s Financial Diary

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Scottrade’s Scottrader Streaming Quotes Look Good

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