Suretrader is an offshore broker (Bahamas) with none of the protections you find in a normal brokerage account. No consumer protection. No SEC regulation.
As pointed out in the other answer, you have no idea what you are doing. Here are 3 books to help.
One Up On Wall Street - Peter Lynch
A Random Walk Down Wall Street - Burton Malkiel
The Intelligent Investor - Benjamin Graham
You shouldn't be short selling or trading penny stocks unless you know what you're doing, which doesn't seem to be that way.
In regards to short selling, the brokerage offers you a fixed rate of "credit" (called margin), which is a multiplier of the cash you deposit into the account. My brokerage offers me up to a 3.3x multiplier for short selling (this can still be dependent on the stock company itself, which can charge for more or less margin), which means (assuming the company allows the full margin), for $1,000, I can short $3,300 worth of shares.
Some margin accounts allow long buying margin as well, albeit not as high as 3.3x (mine gives up to 2x, depending on the company).
As for penny stocks, there's nothing special about them. They're just like any other stock, and follow the same margin account conditions while offering the same amount of margin (depending on the company). There is no easy gain to penny stocks, or stocks in general.
Hi guys, I'm a relatively new trader, looking into using SureTrader and I have a few questions that I really can't seem to get clear cut answers to either looking on their site or looking at different blogs on the internet (most of them are posts from 2010-2012 and I understand the brokerage has changed a lot since then).
First off, do you actually need the $2.50 for every share you short? And how does that even work anyway... They gave a very vague example on the site '1,000 shares at a value of $1.00 per share, you will need at least $2,500 in your account'. So is this a static $2.50 for every share (ie. 200 shares of a $.60 stock and a $1.30 stock would be the same)? Or $2.50 per every dollar of each share? Pretty confused
Next, does Suretrader ACTUALLY offer the 6:1 leverage on pennies? Or does it not like it says on the site... I have a hard time taking any word on the site verbatim seeing as one of the main policies is that '(SureTrader) does not service accounts for U.S. citizens'... which can't be true, I've seen plenty of people write about their experiences living in the US.
Lastly are specific questions about the quality of Suretrader in general
For one, I've seen many people complain about how hard it is to get an account started/ even get money out of the account.. what have your experiences been?
And two, is the online trading platform really that bad? I want to use it fluidly between my mac and windows, ntm it's free..
Thank you
