Online with a discount Crime Family, as is our lot these days, we would’ve
checked “Buy” or “Sell” on the “Trade” window, added the "Number of Shares", "Symbol", "Order Type" (always “Limit” for us ever since the Flash Crash, and appropriate
“Price”), and “Time-in-Force” (“Day” for us).
The “Special Instructions” and “Routing” defaults are “None” and
“Smart”, respectively, and we never mess with them.
This is where the typical investor deals with sundry typical investor issues, things like thoughts of suicide, where you're going to live when the bank takes your home, how many times you've lost money using this $#%&ing form, how much money you've lost using this $#%&ing form, and just who your testamentary heirs are this year and how much of the estate each is going to get his/her grabby little hands on.
This is where the typical investor deals with sundry typical investor issues, things like thoughts of suicide, where you're going to live when the bank takes your home, how many times you've lost money using this $#%&ing form, how much money you've lost using this $#%&ing form, and just who your testamentary heirs are this year and how much of the estate each is going to get his/her grabby little hands on.
Then we would’ve clicked on the big
“Review Order” button at the bottom of the window, compared our limit price
with the current market quote and bid and ask offers on the display that popped
up next, and, deciding we were okay there, hit “Place Order”.
For some inexplicable reason, thoughts of who your testamentary heirs are probably going to be next year often runs through the typical investor's mind at this point in the order-placing process, as well as how much of the estate each is probably going to get his/her grabby little hands on this time, and we would've been no exception to this inexplicability, we're sure.
For some inexplicable reason, thoughts of who your testamentary heirs are probably going to be next year often runs through the typical investor's mind at this point in the order-placing process, as well as how much of the estate each is probably going to get his/her grabby little hands on this time, and we would've been no exception to this inexplicability, we're sure.
The final step, hitting “Order Status”
on the top bar of the current window, would've come next, and we always pause for something more than a
millisecond before doing so as it generally takes at least a millisecond to
fill an order these days, only, Holy Calamari, yesterday one could’ve sat for up to maybe three whole hours, or whatever it was, waiting for a fill to come in.
Would we have been savvy enough to check
the “Streaming Quotes” screen and see WTF?
You betcha. That display is
always up and dazzling us before we ever get started with the wheeling and
dealing. And there would’ve been no
changes to any of the NASDAQ numbers there.
The NYSE quotes would’ve been flipping green and red and the occasional
black to indicate up, down, or even from the last trade or yesterday’s close,
depending on which column you were gawking at, but the NASDAQ, they would’ve
been, like, totally lifeless. Since we
only have two NASDAQ issues on our “Streaming Quotes” thingie, tech giants INTL and AAPL, it would’ve
looked tech-specific to us. Like China stopped using computers. Or somebody had
invented something, and it wasn't INTL or APPL. Maybe time travel, and nobody was going to stay home in front of a laptop anymore. Or need cell phones when people can now warp over and say what they want in person.
ALL NASDAQ STOCKS HAD JUST GONE TO ZERO, AND THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE DIDN"T KNOW HOW TO TELL US.
ALL NASDAQ STOCKS HAD JUST GONE TO ZERO, AND THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE DIDN"T KNOW HOW TO TELL US.
NOW would be a good time for us.
