Is Fidelity Active Trader Worth It for Day Trading? (My Honest Review) transcript

[Music] in today's episode I'm going to teach you how to set up Fidelity's active Trader Pro platform for day trading I'm a full-time Trader and so I'm going to set up this platform and optimize it to be as quick as possible because my goal as always is execution speed this is a fully funded account so I also take some live trades today where we'll actually time the execution speed to see how fast it is and to see how this platform compares to some of the other Brokers that I've done reviews on so through this episode you will get my honest review of whether or not I think Fidelity active Trader Pro is a good platform for day trading and by the end of this episode I think you'll be able to make a decision of whether or not you think it's the right fit for you so let's go ahead and jump on to the screen share you can see it front and center Fidelity active Trader Pro now I've already gone ahead and modified some of these settings just to make it a little bit more visually appealing for my preferences um now I'm on a 4k monitor right here and when I first loaded uh the platform it was kind of in a smaller window like this so the first thing I had to do was make it a little bit larger now you could make it full screen but I kind of just kept it to this area which for me was good enough now for me the first thing that I needed was to find level two and I was a little bit confused about how to even find level two so when you first load it log into the platform or load it um you get these three different layouts right here which are all sort of basic and didn't really suit me that well so I went ahead and created a new layout and that's what you see right here so on this new layout I kind of built it out with the windows that I felt like I needed so the first window that I created is this positions window up in the top corner now you can see I can move it around like this unlike some of the other platforms where when you move a window it can replace another window and I'll just show you an example of what that looks like um on Weeble I'm going to load up my Weeble platform so this is Weeble right here and when you move a window it gives you the chance to kind of place it see how you can place it on the side or tab it inside that window so you can't do that with active Trader it's a little bit a little more I would say probably older um oldfashioned just in the way it's kind of set up so you do have the ability to snap windows together and kind of make them like this but um but you sort of have to manually adjust them I'll do that later on Weeble so then the next window that I wanted was my um my orders window so I went to accounts and I went down to oh no sorry I went to trade and orders and I went down to the orders window I put that right here and then I was struggling to find my level two window I was like where the heck is level two I thought it would be under Trade and orders multi trade you know I'm not seeing level two anywhere so where do you find it it's under directed trade and extended hours which is kind of a funny place to tuck the level two in uh so the level two window is right here and it's actually attached to this active Trader window all right so that's fine that's just the way it's the way it's set up it's a to me a little silly I I think it would be helpful just to be able to pull up a level two window and have it be independent but that's fine they're connected together all right so that's our level two window down here we've got a news window over here we have charts so I've got two charts set up I've got a one minute chart and I've got a f minute chart so let's go ahead and take the first trade now what I'm going to do here is my well my first instinct before I even take the first trade is can I set shift one to be a hotkey to execute an order so if we jump onto the Whiteboard I'll put this spare keyboard here what you guys know about my trading is I trade with hot keys so I want to press shift 1 to buy 1,000 shares shift two to buy 2,000 3 4 5 6 7 Etc I want to press contrl Z to sell my full position contrl X to sell half contrl C to sell a quarter or is that contrl V anyways contrl C so these are the keys that I'm using constantly buying and selling just by pressing the buttons as I was editing this video I realized that some of you may be interested in learning more about my day trading strategy so what I've done is I've put together a PDF resource it's it's called my small account worksheet and it outlines my five pillars of stock selection the type of stocks I choose and how I'm able to find them in real time that's the first step then I walk you through my precise entries and exits the the technical chart patterns that I use to establish what I think is a low-risk entry so I can have a positive profit to loss ratio because in trading you can put the odds in your favor by making sure your winners are always bigger than your losers and that means you've got to be really good at managing risk so if you want to check out my small account worksheet there will be a link it's pinned at the top comments and it's linked in the description as well you can click on that you can download the resource print it out and start using it in your own trading today all right so with that said let's go ahead and get back into this demo so unfortunately well I've got bad news for you Fidelity does not offer hot keys in fact I've got a broker comparison sheet that will go over here comparing Fidelity which is this column right here in the Middle with Robin Hood Weeble Schwab E Trade trade station interactive brokers light and pro and light speed trading but the first uh the first big hit that um is on the Fidelity is that there are no hot Keys no offsets and no by default no hotkeys for selling a portion of the position and that is unfortunate um now of course one of the big appeals for Fidelity like Robin Hood Weeble Schwab erade and interactive brokers and trade station is that it is a commission free platform so there's no commissions when you trade with Fidelity so that is really nice but um there are also no hotkeys however that's okay because if you're on this window right here you can go into settings right here and you can actually set up a couple different things so the first thing you can do is you could change uh the color of your hotkey from or the color of your level two from Blues like this you could change that to what you can see right here which is industry not sure why they call industry but um that is the way I typically look at level two so I do prefer that back on the settings window here we can go to order types and select Advanced order types that suit your trading Styles so they allow you to place Reserve orders pegged orders and non-display orders which I think is kind of interesting um because that's not something that is an option with most other commission free Brokers most commission free Brokers won't let you use non-display or pegged orders or Reserve orders so that's interesting and then the third tab is shortcuts so you can create shortcuts you can't create hot keys but you can do shortcuts and what I did was I went to the plus sign and I went to create a custom shortkey so a short key is essentially a button it creates a hot button like what you see right here so when you click on this button what it's going to do if I click the button bu ask or ask plus 10 what's it going to do it's going to enter an order here but I still have to press the place button to place the order so It prepares an order so buy and then this would be sell changes from buy to sell here and changes the price so those are the things that are getting changed um and it'll also change if we go into the settings we can have it change the quantity so I have these all set for 100 shares right now so buy 100 shares and with this button you can do an offset 10 cents the ask so although it's not a hot key it is a hot button um although I don't know a hot button makes it seem like it would actually send the order so it's it's a button um it's a it's a cold button because you actually have to press place but nonetheless and then the route you can either select as Auto or you can choose some of these different routes which I think is interesting because typically with a commission free broker you're not able to choose any routes you could place an order but you can't choose the route it's just either a limit order or a market order so they do give you the ability to choose your route or so it seems although I'm not sure exactly how this works um so I found that interesting um and we can look at that in a little bit more detail in a moment so I set that up to be a buy order uh and you could choose different actions buy to cover sell to short or buy or sell so I set it to a buy order I set it as a limit order in contrast to Market or stop orders and the reason I want to do this is because I want to make sure that I can send this order pre-market and take pre-market trades so pre-market trading at Fidelity begins at 7:00 a.m. and uh you can trade until 8:00 p.m.

I have uh the the uh route at Auto although I could select a specific route I'll leave it at Auto for right na well let's try putting it on NASDAQ let's just try that um and display now when you're on NASDAQ I could say hidden to make it a hidden order let's just see if that works and then the conditions will leave it none all right so that was ask plus 10 and then sell bid is going to be sell 10 cents below the bid so it's using an offset and I'm going to rout try routing this one to NASDAQ as well and we'll make this a a hidden order so it does not display none all right and we're not doing pegged orders although we have the option to do a pegged order we're not going to do a pegged order all right so let's see if these orders go through so we're going to do ask right here and this is going to be a live order so I'm going to place it the order says it's filled says it's filled at 367 but it says I have no positions in my positions window there it is and that's my first complain it's slow did you see it I mean let's be real that was slow that was pretty slow to populate that I had a position right there I I don't think that that's really an ideal situation um you know just for comparison over at light speed I'll just do an order right here um I I'll just do the same 100 shares so 100 shares is going to be the stock it shows up immediately immediately and oh I got to sell at 44 and it's gone immediately so maybe that was just one order let's try it again Ask plus 10 all right so so we're clicking this ask plus 10 order and we're going to place it it still shows 100 shares even though here it shows that I filled and now it's updated okay so that's that to me is not ideal let's go sell at ask sell at ask at 69 uh we'll put well it's going to be sell at ask at 70 so my order is sell it ask ask and my order right now is sitting at the ask at 370 and I'm waiting oh it says I filled and then it showed right there updated so now you know this is to me clearly uh I'm going to sell on the ask the another another um 100 shares so click sell on ask and then click place so you can tell I I think pretty quickly here that this is a little bit bit of an issue um I'm I'm honestly a little bit shocked that it's not faster to update the positions window here um but we'll try a couple different things and we'll try a couple different stocks and see if it changes so let's try um well let's just try I don't know um let's just try Ford we'll just try Ford Motor Company all right it's a big big company we'll do ask but instead of doing the the special route we'll just put it on auto let's see maybe just leaving it on auto will be faster all right so we're going to do ask plus 10 oh no but we're going to switch to Auto so it's a limit order and I'm going to place it order filled at 10:30 so it says it filled instantly and it filled between the spread at 10:30 and half a cent but again it takes like two seconds to fill up here to or to show in the positions window that is bizarre click sell bid place the order now that went through the other route it says I filled right there at 10:30 so back in and out so the order execution speed feels tolerable but um the fact that it's slow to show up here to me is a real problem let's go back to um ask so let's try another out route we'll try NY I don't know if this will go through but let's just try it anyways so we'll do 100 shares place the order and that filled right away again and it keeps filling in between the spread so I'm back in but where's the where is it showing in my position window you you guys know how quickly as a day trader we move in and out of the market so oh and it shows you the price Improvement that you get total price Improvement 50 cents which is nice but now right right now I'm confused because I bought 100 sold 100 but now I'm not seeing this position on for I'm going to go and try to buy again um so now I've got I should have 200 shares well now it's showing uh there it goes now it's showing 200 shares okay so this is a little this is a little slow um and that's just with 100 share positions you know if I tried to trade with bigger size um you know that would be a problem now this is a Roth IRA account it's a retirement account and um it's showing that my settled cash is depleting which also means that if I start doing a couple thousand share positions I will run out of settled cash um so that's something to be aware of but most you may not all be using these types of accounts this is something that I happen to be using all right so now I'm going to click ask plus 10 uh oh no that's the buy button so I'm going to do I'm just going to do sell bid we'll change it to 200 so sell bid place and we're out of the position we filled with no price Improvement but we filled at um $10.30 now let's go back to amod amod all right so this one's dipped down a little bit I'm down looks like $10 on that so we're going to do 100 shares Here Sell bid and we're going to place the order so it's a lot of pointing and clicking right oh no oh okay no that's helpful um because I still had that order out so I've got to cancel the order that's out here right here click cancel now usually what I like to do is I like to have a hotkey where I can press control q and cancel all open orders but I don't have that hot key here so I have to manually cancel it so I manually cancel it and now I can place the order to sell the 100 shares now you'll notice that once you sell the positions are gone so if you click manage or you you go to positions and you go to closed positions you can see today the closed positions so what I would probably end up doing is opening two versions of this window one would be for closed positions so I can monitor my profit or loss on closed positions and one would be for open positions uh so and what we actually have to do here is we have to look at our uh gain and loss cuz we we want to know how much money we made on the day right so $337 here for today in profit uh so these would be the stocks I traded and that's my p&l so I would create a second window just like this and we're going to make this one um we we'll just sort of adjust these so this will be the smaller one and this will be open positions so I'll put it right about here um actually we might rearrange that but that's fine so I'll have this one be closed positions and this one be open positions cuz I look at the top left for my open positions and this will be positions today and then I'll just make the um orders window just a little bit smaller here let's see if it'll let me do that oh so it it doesn't actually want to let me grab onto the window that's tucked in the back without moving this up so I got to move this up I got to move this down so you can tell it's just like a little bit um you know to me feels like a little I don't know little clunky maybe um now in terms of so that's that's a walkth through of our level two window right here uh in our order entry window so I think you can already tell that um if we're going to come up here onto our comparison um there's no question that so far um this has been the slowest desktop experience that I've had um so I'm going to put this in red here because this and actually I'm going to put it in like a slightly darker red because this really is too slow having it be that slow to update the positions window for me is not acceptable um so if we kind of look at um by comparison free that's great free trading and options trading 65 cents per contract direct routing so this one I'm a little bit confused about because I I believe that the answer is no that these orders go through their wholesale or which is how we're getting price Improvement on it um but the fact that it does show um some possible routes here make me a little bit curious about that so so I'm I'm just going to say I don't like to say maybe but um I'll just say unclear um at least as of right now because if it was truly direct access routing I would also pay a commission so I'm just going to say this this part's a little unclear um execution speed um 04 now that is based on um Fidelity's disclosure here so commitment to order execution so under their commitment to order execution they uh say their current execution speed is 04 seconds uh the ex execution speed that I timed at light speed trading was 01 so light speed um is quite fast 01 and the other Brokers on this list um so Fidelity 04 trade station 044 E Trade is much slower Schwab is 05 Weeble is 0.12 so 0.4 is is actually fast um I think that it would be fair to say that it's fast and so what's really a shame is that it's fast and yet for some reason um it's slow to update right here but of course without hotkeys you're also Limited in how quickly you can trade you can only move in and out of this so quickly without those hotkeys uh so uh so then back to this uh list so execution speed here um they do get a green for that price Improvement uh they report a price Improvement of $28 for every 100 shares and that is also as per their disclosures that they're required to make and this is um these these update quarterly but this is currently so I would also say that they rank well here um really can't complain about that that's that's solid interactive brokers um light is the highest um although E Trade they sometimes they give the numbers slightly differently so um routing fees I don't have any routing fees because it's the commission free broker PDT rule yes they do enforce the PDT rule as you know paper trading yes they do offer paper trading minimum account size they don't have a minimum extended hours uh 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. so 400 a.m. to 800 p.m. would be the full hour full Market hours um and most retail Brokers don't offer that desktop experience well it's it's not great level two yep they've got level two a little hard to find but they've got it no hot Keys that's a problem charting very basic they don't have sub one minute time frames so on charting the fastest time frame that they offer is um the one minute chart so you don't get a 10-second chart you know 15c chart it's just one minute that's as that's as fast as you can go um in order to zoom into the chart you can't use your mouse so I like to use the trackpad for zooming um if I pull up um trade Dash which is our software you could see how I can zoom in and out by scrolling on the on the mouse wheel so you can uh adjust the axis here you could scroll um you know this way so that is at this point I would say pretty much expected functionality for most platforms you know you could do it on uh Weeble it just makes it so you can navigate and move around the charts it's just easier and unfortunately that's not something you can do you can grab on it uh which is good but the scrolling um doesn't doesn't work at least not intuitively um there may be a way to get it to work you can punch in you can punch in like this with the zoom in but that's that's different and that's that takes longer to do that so I would say the charts are um a bit dated in in comparison to uh what most other platforms are currently offering their news feed um and I I'm not sure if there's really much else to cover on the charts when you first load them you have to rightclick you have to go to style and then go to Candlestick filled uh by default I think it was a chart like this open close high low so you go to settings you change the style down to Candlestick filled um under settings you also have to show extended hours if you want to see extended hours so you've got to make sure you do that and then if you want to add your indicators of course you can add your indic ators for the most part the indicators that I use are standard they're available everywhere exponential moving averages of course they have that macd of course they have macd so there's no surprise there they have these standard indicators um volume weighted average price they have as well so that's fine um but no sub one minute time frames and the ability to sort of navigate and adjust the chart is fairly limited so back on this comparison doc um these are these are are going to both be in in slight red oops uh we'll do it uh oops we're going to do sorry going to go full screen it's over here do the background okay so those are both in slightly red um they do accept International accounts uh because they have non- us branches the market data is free you don't have to pay extra for it you can get four times leverage they don't have futures or Forex currently they do have some crypto they do offer retirement accounts and they do allow OTC trading these are not I mean Super deal breakers either way for me but just um as noteworthy so I would currently um say the interactive brokers on this or sorry uh Fidelity on this scale right now um Robin Hood is is the worst right now um and I'll I'll just add a row insert above um I guess I would say on a scale of 1 to 10 um how much do I like this brok or would I consider using it with real money um we should quantify that anything below a five I probably would not use with real money I would say light speed which is the broker I'm using uh for real money right now is probably around a nine it's not perfect there are some things I don't love about it but I do like it Weeble was for me probably like a 6.5 or a seven um I could use it with real money but not with big share size Fidelity is probably going to be based on the issues with the updating like a 4.5 right now um and Robin Hood is at this point a one um just for comparison and er trade and trade station sort of fill these These are sort of all on the in between um so Fidelity is not the worst but they're also not the best now I did notice something here um that when I go into settings and I go to the shortcuts and I've already got um these ones set up so let's go into Uh custom uh so let's see um we'll do uh sell uh we'll do we'll do another ask 1K we'll do a bigger position so we're going to do a buy order we're going to do quantity um a th000 shares limit is going to be above the ask and we're going to do by 10 cents day order autor route and then let's go here let's do another one custom we're going to do um sell 1K so we'll do the same thing selling 1,000 and Order type limit action it's a sell order and it's below the bid by 10 so just set setting these up here uh and then is there another one that I wanted to add um so this is sell it ask right we got that okay so now now we've got a little bit of a problem you may notice the level two in the background has stopped updating right here and oh so it's kind of I'm so I'm sort of in this Loop here where I can't and it's gone so it just closed it closed all by itself and that's um that happened a couple times earlier so that um I think that is g to confirm it staying at a 4.5 and like I said anything below a five I just there's you know I I hate to say it but there's just better platforms out there and you could say Ross I've never had this problem this is just your computer is funny and you know this isn't something that happens on my computer and you may be right you may be right maybe this is just my computer uh being a little funny and uh could be uh but I did notice when I was in the settings window this is now the third time that I've been in here creating custom hot keys and it doesn't uh it doesn't take well to it so we'll do it again bid uh 1K sell 1K shares you know you don't want to push a platform till it crashes but um it should it should be a little harder for that to happen than just um you know messing around with some hot keys so 10 cents below and then we'll click apply go back into the settings go to here so that's a custom one and then we'll add another custom one it seemed to be related to the custom ones ask 1K so we'll do buy we'll do limit we'll do a th shares and I'd like to test out trading a couple of um um bigger orders but we'll see if I can get to that so so now this is what happens once you've create once you've created one if you change to another without clicking apply we're Frozen again so let's see if it resumes on its own maybe it will give it a second yeah so oh but then clicking on on the bid so right now I'm in this sort of loop where I can't I can't really do anything now uh this earlier when I grabbed a screenshot of it this was the error that it gave me um encountered unrecoverable error exiting so right now it seems like it's it's not like you know I just click the cancel oh and here we go so so I do have that same error message it's down on my other monitor so now we're we're kind of locked out so you know I mean this is not not ideal um you know to have that happen so we're so we're logged out again so let's log back in all right so let's just let's just say for the sake of argument that um this is just a an issue with the hot keys and and maybe it's maybe it is just my computer maybe my computer um even though I'm running other platforms with no issue that this one is is difficult okay we'll give it the benefit of the doubt all right so um you know could it also be that that's why the positions window is slow to update maybe um you know it's possible so let's see so what do we have here so we do still need that order for the ask well I'll just type it in all right so amod let's see um now I'm going to pull up my before I take an order with bigger size I just want to see if if there's anything moving on the scans right now that I should be focused on nothing in particular amod what's the setup on this yeah below vwap slightly all right so I could probably jump in and out of it without losing too too much so I'll go ahead and do uh 2,000 shares of this and let's just punch it all right so I'm going to do 67 place the order um all all right so I'm in there at 6 7 and that was see this is what's interesting sometimes um so now I'm going to do 2,000 shares and I'm going to do sell so now you're in the sort of fumble right um where it's like oh shoot I want to get out every time you click on here to click the price it changes your order size so now you're kind of like all right shoot I can't move in and out of this as quick as I wanted to so I want to change it to to bid 1,000 shares and and what was my average price um I filled at 67 so I'm in at 67 now it's back to 65 with 2,000 shares all right so there it goes now it's showing and I'm not on a VPN or doing anything like that so this I just have regular um you know regular regular data or regular uh internet connection so I'm going to do 2,000 shares we'll click um sell it ask 2,000 shares all right we'll place the order sometimes um you put an order on the ask right there so now my order is showing I'm going to cancel that order so I canceled that order and my order was on Ed X it looks like potentially so now the order is cancelled price is dipping down a little bit but that's okay um we're going to do two 2,000 shares again we're going to put the route to no I don't want to do pegged order yeah so these are really just the options they're pretty minimal okay so 2,000 shares or I'll do yeah I'll just do 2,000 shares and really this wasn't about making money this is sort of about testing the platform a little bit so sell 2,000 share order so filled so I'm out all right so it filled at 615 it's a little bit uh no price Improvement on these orders it doesn't it doesn't indicate so you know uh I I my my just gut feeling right now is that this is um this is just a little bit it's a little clunky um the lack of hot keys that that for me by itself is a deal breaker we'll try doing 2,000 shares of uh actually I can't do I try 1500 shares so by 1500 shares filled right in between the spread 30 30 and A5 cents there bid 1500 shares so finally it shows up I'll go ahead and place that order to sell oh so we got to cancel that because I got a quick uh switch to sell and then we'll just save place the order filled at 31 so I got PR so actually that's interesting I got price Improvement on that so that trade I just made um what was it 10 bucks five bucks because I got in at 30 and a half and I got out at 31 it filled me so I got price Improvement on this both ways um so that you know that's kind of nice and you know you do get some price improvement with this broker but that's not the the little bit of price Improvement is not enough to make up for um what clearly is is a bit of a dated platform so if you're day trading using Fidelity I would love to hear how you're doing it I would love to hear how you're making it work I imagine you're using buttons hot buttons um you know how is this working for you I I'm I'm almost um baffled at at how it how it could work but I I know some people use it I know a number of people people were asking me um you know to do a video on using it so I thought all right I'll fund an account I'll test it out but I'm I'm just really kind of at a loss at how you could quickly move in and out of stocks with this platform right here it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me how you could do it so you guys tell me uh how is it done there must be there must be a secret that I'm missing but as far as I can tell right now for me lack of hot Keys is going to be a deal breaker on any platform the only reason Robin Hood is worse is because they all they have they don't have hotkeys and their desktop platform also doesn't have level two so that's like totally out that's just like not even a serious platform but you need to have hot keys for me you need to have level two which is this has and it needs to be a reliable platform that I can move in and out of you know pretty quickly and I don't feel like my experience with this has been um has given me a lot of confidence so that's that's where I'm at right now I would love to hear your feedback and hey if you're watching this episode and you want to learn more about the strategy that I trade every single day you may have noticed I'm sitting up $2,198 on the day I am a momentum day trader I focus on trading highly volatile stocks and I'll put a link in the description for this episode and I'll actually pin it to the top of um the comments where you could download my small account worksheet to learn more more about the strategy that I trade every single day I'll tell you as always my results aren't typical and trading is risky so please manage your risk take it slow if you enjoyed this episode I hope you hit the thumbs up and check out some of the other platform demos and honest reviews that I've given on some of the other competitors on this list because I think there's a few out there that out of the gate seem to have a more compelling offering than Fidelity active Trader Pro all right thanks as always for tuning in I'll see you for the next upload real soon d