Online Stock Brokers

Investors should know the best online stock brokers to trade with. The following top stock brokers offer investors the most value for their portfolios. Some online stock brokers are known for their award winning customer service while others are known for inexpensive stock trades or powerful trading tools. This guide will highlight some of the best stock brokers available today with tips and advice for selecting a new broker.

1. TD Ameritrade

TD Ameritrade was ranked #1 Online Broker 2012 – 2015 by StockBrokers.com* even with its $9.99 stock trades. Its platforms thinkorswim (ranked “#1 Desktop Platform” 2016) and Trade Architect are loaded with tools and features. Add to that TD Ameritrade’s education, robust research, mobile apps, etc and what you pay for is what you get.

TD Ameritrade Offer: Trade free for 60 days + Get up to $600 with any new account.

2. ETRADE

ETRADE shines for its mobile apps and all-around offering. ETRADE was rated #1 for Mobile Trading in the StockBrokers.com 2016 Review* and provides customers research tools similar to TD Ameritrade and Scottrade. Like TD Ameritrade, ETRADE charges $9.99 per trade but offsets high cost with a positive customer experience. 

ETRADE Offer: Trade free for 60 days + Get up to $600 with any new account.

3. OptionsHouse

OptionsHouse is the perfect marriage of discounted trade commissions fantastic options trading tools. OptionsHouse has been rated #1 for Options Trading the past five years and #1 for Commissions & Fees. OptionsHouse offers $4.95 flat fee stock trades alongside options trades for $4.95 + $.50 per contract. 

OptionsHouse Offer: Trade Free for 60 Days. 

4. TradeKing

TradeKing offers investors competitive $4.95 stock trades, quality customer service, and research tools that are better than its discount broker peers. TradeKing merged with Zecco in 2012, acquired MB Trading in 2015, and continues to expand its reach with new tools like TradeKing LIVE, the broker’s mobile friendly trading platform. 

TradeKing Offer: Get $100 in Free Trade Commissions.

5. Scottrade

Scottrade has over 500 local branch offices which is the largest network out of any of the online brokers. Known for its customer service, Scottrade has been awarded #1 Overall Client Experience the past five years. Regular stock trades are $7 each which is less than competitors TD Ameritrade and ETRADE but more than OptionsHouse and TradeKing. 

Scottrade Offer: $2,000 in Cash Bonus and 50 Free Trades. 

Learn Stock Trading as a New Investor

1. Open a stock broker account

Find a good online stock broker and open an account. Become familiarized with the layout and to take advantage of the free trading tools and research offered to clients only. 

2. Read books

Books provide a wealth of information and are inexpensive compared to the costs of classes, seminars, and educational DVDs sold across the web. Here on the site we have a full list of 20 great stock trading books for investors to consider. 

3. Read articles

Articles are a fantastic resource for education. Recommended websites for investment education are investopedia.com and of course Google search.

4. Find a mentor

A mentor could be a family member, a friend, a past or current professor, co-worker, or any individual that has a fundamental understanding of the stock market. A good mentor is willing to answer questions, provide help, recommend useful resources, and keep spirits up when the market gets tough. All successful investors of the past and present have had mentors during their early days.

5. Study the greats

Learning about the greatest investors of years past will provide perspective, inspiration, and appreciation for the game which is the stock market. 

6. Read and follow the market

News sites such as Yahoo Finance and Google Finance serve as a great resource for new investors. For in depth coverage, look no further than the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. 

7. Consider paid subscriptions

Paying for research and analysis can be both educational and useful. Some investors may find watching or observing market professionals to be more beneficial than trying to apply newly learned lessons themselves. 

8. Go to seminars, take classes

Seminars can provide valuable insight into the overall market and specific investment types. Most seminars will focus on one specific aspect of the market and how the speaker has found success utilizing their own strategies over the years.

9. Buy your first stock or practice trading through a simulator

With your online broker account setup, the best way to get started it to simply take the plunge and make your first trade. 

Tips For Investment Success

Ref : https://www.stocktrader.com/2007/09/12/60-stock-tips-for-investment-success/

1. As a new investor, be prepared to take some small losses. 
2. Always cut your losses at 8% below your purchase price. 
3. Persistence is key when learning to invest. Don’t get discouraged.
4. Learning to invest doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and effort to become successful at it.
5. When getting started, it is important that you pick the right full service or discount brokerage. If you use a broker, make sure he or she has a good track record.
6. As a beginner, set up a cash account, not a margin account.
7. It only takes $500 to $1,000 to get started. Experience is a great teacher.
8. Avoid more volatile types of investments, such as futures, options, and foreign stocks.
9. Concentrate on a few, high-quality stocks. There’s no need to own twenty or more stocks.
10. Don’t get emotionally involved with your stocks. Follow a set of buying and selling rules, and don’t let your emotions change your mind 
11. Don’t buy a stock under $15 a share. The best companies that are leaders in their fields simply do not come at $5 or $10 per share.
12. Learning from the best stock market winners can guide you to tomorrow’s leaders. 
13. Always do a post-analysis of your stock market trades so that you can learn from your successes and mistakes.
14. A combination of fundamental and technical investment styles is essential to picking winning stocks.
15. Fundamental analysis looks at a company’s earnings, earnings growth, sales, profit margins, and return on equity among other things. It helps narrow down your choices so that you are only dealing with quality stocks.
16. Technical analysis involves learning to read a stock’s price and volume chart and timing your decisions properly.
17. To make big money, you have got to buy the very best companies at the right time.
18. Strong sales and earnings are amongst the most important characteristics of winning stocks.
19. Buying a stock as it is coming out of a price consolidation area or base is crucial to making large gains.
20. Always pick stocks from the leading industry groups or sectors. The majority of past market leaders were in the top industry groups and sectors.
21. Many big winning stocks come from sectors such as drugs and medical, computers, communications technology, software, specialty retail, and leisure and entertainment.
22. Volume is the actual number of shares traded by a stock 
23. Stocks never go up by accident. There must be large buying, typically from big investors such as mutual funds and pension funds.
24. In studying the greatest stock market winners over the past 45 years, bases formed just before the stock broke out into new high ground in price and then went on to make their biggest gains.
25. The most common pattern is a “cup with handle” names so because it resembles a coffee cup when viewed from the side.
26. The optimal buying point of any stock is the “pivot point”.
27. On the day a stock breaks out, volume should increase by 50% or more above its average.
28. A decrease in price on decreased volume indicates no significant selling.
29. Replace the old adage, “buy low and sell high” with “buy high and sell a lot higher.”
30. You want to buy a stock at its pivot point. Don’t chase a stock up more than 5% past its pivot.
31. Chart price and volume action frequently can help you recognize when a stock has reached its top and should be sold.
32. History always repeats itself in the stock market.
33. Most big stock market leaders breaking out of a sound base will go up 20% in eight weeks or less from the pivot point. Never sell a stock that does this in four weeks or less, you may have a big winner.
34. Tracking the general market is key because most stocks follow the trend of the general market.
35. Ignore personal opinions about the market.
36. A typical bear market will decline 20% to 25% from its peak price. A negative political or economic environment could cause a more severe decline.
37. Knowing when to both buy a sell a stock is key for success.
38. three out of four stocks , regardless of how “good’ will eventually follow the trend of the overall market.
39. After four or five days of distribution within a two to three week period, the general market will normally trend downwards.
40. Bear markets create fear and uncertainty. When stocks hit bottom and turn up to begin the next bull market loaded with opportunities, most people simply don’t believe it.
41. At some point on the way down, the indices will attempt to rebound or rally. A rally is an attempt by a stock or the general market to turn up and advance in price after a period of decline.
42. Most technical market indicators are of little value. Psychological indicators like the Put-Call ratio can help confirm changes in the market’s direction.
43. Once you determine you are operating in an uptrending general market, you need to pick superior stocks.
44. Potential winners will have strong earnings and sales growth, increasing profit margins and high return on equity (17% or more). They should also be in a leading industry group.
45. Using a chart service can help you determine if the timing is right to buy a stock.
46. There are two basic types of investors: growth stock investors and value investors.
47. Growth investors seek companies with strong earnings and sals growth, superior profit margins, and a return on equity of over 17%.
48. Value investors search for stocks that are undervalued and have low P/E ratios.
49. When starting to invest, keep it simple. Only invest in domestic stocks or mutual funds. (Education on Fund Loads Scams and Mutual Fund Fees are necessary before investing. Consider ETF investing as an alternative)
50. You get what you pay for in the market. Low-priced stocks are usually cheap for a good reason.
51. Options are risky because investors do not only have to be right about the direction of the stock but also about the time frame in which they believe the price will go up or down.
52. Futures, due to their highly speculative nature, should be attempted only be people with several years of successful investment experience.
53. Wide diversification and asset allocation are not necessary. Concentrate your eggs in fewer basket, know them well and watch them carefully.
54. If you have less than $5,000 to invest, only own one or two stocks. If you have $10,000-two or three stocks; $25,000-three or four stocks; $50,000-four or five stocks; and, $100,000 or more-own no more than six stocks.
55. If you already own the maximum number of stocks buy want to add a new stock to your portfolio, force yourself to sell the least profitable stock to get money for the new name.
56. When purchasing a stock, only buy half of your desired position at the initial buy point. Buy a small amount more if the price rises 2% or 3% above your first buy. Average up in price, never down.
57. Don’t let yourself lose money after you already had a reasonable profit.
58. 40% of stocks will pull back to their initial buy point-sometimes on big volume- for one or two days. Don’t let this shake you out of your stock.
59. Sell a stock if its earnings per share shows a major deceleration in growth for two quarters in a row.

Tips in Trading

1) Choose Your Trading Style Carefully. Give plenty of thought to what kind of online stock trading you want to do. Would you prefer day trading, where you close out every trade at the end of each day? How about short-term trading where you are in a position several days at a time? Maybe you'd rather be a weekly trader or monthly trader. Though you can always change your mind, it's wise to have a clear idea of the style of stock trading you prefer BEFORE you start.

2) Match Your Trading Style To Your Lifestyle. Your choice of trading style is especially important from a lifestyle perspective. Day trading usually means you will be at your computer for hours at a time. Longer term online stock trading doesn't require as much attention. As a rule, the shorter the time frame the more intense the trading.

3) Select A Broker That Matches Your Trading Style. The type of online stock trading you choose to do will determine the type of broker to use. Day traders need high-speed direct access technology. Short-term daily, weekly, and monthly traders can use less sophisticated discount brokers. When it comes to broker fees and other costs, day trading is the most expensive.

4) Use A Low-Risk High-Reward Trading Method. Stock trading involves risk. Most people inflict serious damage to their trading account before they learn how to win consistently. Though it may not seem glamorous, risk management is essential for successful online stock trading. The only way to get the reward is to control the risk.

5) Make Sure Your Trading Method Works in All Markets. The stock market doesn't just go up. It goes down too - sometimes for months or years. Use an online stock trading method that takes advantage of both down-markets and up-markets.

6) Trade The Best Stocks. Superior stock selection takes advanced skills and extensive research. Unless you are extremely skilled with lots of spare time, it's usually best to seek the advice of a professional. Avoid big brokerage firms and mutual funds. Facts show that most of their trading "experts" end up losing money.

7) Know When To Sell Your Stocks. Everyone focuses on what and when to buy stock, yet few ever consider the best time to sell. Paper profits only become real money when you convert them to cash. Don't let your stock gains disappear due to neglect. Plan ahead. Before you get in, always know the specific conditions that will signal when it's time to get out.

8) Check Your Winning Edge. A "winning edge" consists of the favorable factors that set winners apart from losers. You must have a reliable advantage to consistently make money trading online. Ask yourself - "What factors give me an edge?" Be specific. If you aren't sure, you probably don't have an edge. The only way to know is to analyze your methods and measure your results.

9) Invest in a good online stock trading education. Surveys show that 9 out of 10 investors believe their chances of winning are "above average" yet more than 80% of them actually lose money. This is simply because they don't have the specific information needed to win. As we say at RightLine, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."

10) Associate With Successful Online Stock Traders. Online stock trading presents unique challenges. Unlike traditional stock trading, there is no live broker to help you along the way. If chosen carefully, experienced online traders can be among your best trading resources. You may even wind up with a good friend!

Vaadin TestBench

Cut away manual testing and automate development, integration and acceptance testing. Vaadin TestBench is a tool for automated user interface testing of web applications on all platforms and browsers. Build pixel perfect tests using friendly Java APIs and run them over and over again.

Vaadin TestBench Tutorial 

https://vaadin.com/wiki/-/wiki/10674/Vaadin+TestBench+Tutorial

Vaadin RPC

Vaadin Framework is a Java web application development framework that is designed to make creation and maintenance of high quality web-based user interfaces easy. Vaadin supports two different programming models: server-side and client-side. The server-driven programming model is the more powerful one. It lets you forget the web and program user interfaces much like you would program a desktop application with conventional Java toolkits such as AWT, Swing, or SWT. But easier. While traditional web programming is a fun way to spend your time learning new web technologies, you probably want to be productive and concentrate on the application logic. The server-side Vaadin framework takes care of managing the user interface in the browser and the AJAX communications between the browser and the server. With the Vaadin approach, you do not need to learn and deal directly with browser technologies, such as HTML or JavaScript.

View HL7 as SOA instance – Part 1

HL 7

It’s an Message Oriented Middleware protocol framework for computer communication between healthcare application systems. HL stand for  "Health Level", and ‘7’ represent OSI layer protocol for the health care environment. It defines standard and formats of the messages that applications should use when exchanging data using MOM.

SOA instance

Service Level and Binding level are two parts that is needed to consider when constructing an instance of HL7 using HL 7 WSDL template. This includes communication between systems, establishing connections and sessions with HL7 external systems using MOM.