As most of you know I opened a broker account with Scottrade last week and that meant that I was ready to trade online. After transferring $500 to my account  I was ready for that Visa IPO. I didn’t sleep Tuesday night at all to be ready early the next morning because I knew those Visa shares were going to jump in price. As soon as the market open the stock reached $65 I think and for a second I thought it would go higher so I tried to buy some shares but for some reason I couldn’t, I tried about 3 times and still I could not buy those Visa shares. I then quickly did some reading about the order types. After that I quickly put in a “stop” order for 8 shares at $65. By then the price had gone down and I was wondering why my order had not gone through, some more reading and then I found out this, “Stop orders are an order to buy or sell a security when its price surpasses a particular point, limiting the investor’s loss or locking in his or her profit”, since the price had gone down the order was not triggered. Some more reading and by then the price was about $61 dollars I think so I put in another order, this time instead of a “Stop” order I went with a ” Limit” order which means, “orders will execute only if the market reaches the specified price or lower”. I placed my order for 8 shares at $60 dollars, the price kept going down and when it reached $60 the order was triggered and I managed to grab 8 shares at $59.50. I ended up losing money that day and that is ok because I am going to wait and see what happens. It was quite a day to say the least but I was happy because I got what I wanted and I wanted Visa and now I own a little piece of that company and hope that you too managed to get some as well.

Setting up an account with Scottrade, easy. Transferring money into my new account, easier. Owning 8 shares of Visa………………….priceless, wink, wink.

If you remember last week I wrote about the Visa IPO. Well as soon as I finished that post I opened an account. The broker I chose was Scottrade for two simple reasons, the $7 dollar trades and their $500 dollar minimum to open an account. I also looked at E-Trade, with them you can trade globally, trade currencies, banking and lending but their price per trade is a bit higher than Scottrade’s and their minimum to open an account is $1000. If I’ve had $10,000 to invest I would have gone with them because of all the services they offer. When I finished signing up I logged in into my new account to check everything, after I was sure how everything worked I logged out and I was finally ready for that IPO and my first ever trade!!. I will tell you more about that on another post.

The day before yesterday the market went up more than 400 points, and that was great. I thought that the market would go up because of the Visa IPO at it did go up early in the morning only to nosedive and end the day down 293 points, and that was bad. That took care of the previous day gains and so far this year that has been the story, up and down, up and down. Now lets find down and see how that up and down motion is treating my 403-B, here we go.

If you are like me then you are always looking to make some money. I keep my eye on companies and of course pay a lot of attention when I hear about an IPO. This time around everybody is talking about the Visa IPO coming up this very Wednesday,Visa has filed to sell 406 million Class A common shares at $37 to $42 apiece. MasterCard, a Visa competitor, share price has more than quadrupled since its May 2006 IPO, it closed today at $201.52. If you already have an account with a broker and if you have some money to invest keep an eye on this one and if you like it then by all means go for it. I am very interested but first I have to open an account with a broker, I better get to work.

Be on the lookout for the new $5 dollar bill that goes into circulation this very day, check at the bottom of this post for a picture. The new $5 has color for the first time and it is similar to changes made to $10, $20 and $50 dollar bills. Next in line for a makeover, none other than the $100 dollar bill.

Oil closed above $110 dollars a barrel today and just below Wednesday’s record of $110.20 a barrel. And in something related to oil, the price of a gallon of regular gasoline is $5.20 in Gorda, California.

If you remember the stock market shot up 417 points on Tuesday. The party continued on Wednesday after a morning rally but by the end of day the market was down 47 points.