Fidelity trading tools?

[Fru-Gal]

Hi everyone,

I've been on Robinhood for a few years, made some money but also took my gains and redeployed into VTSAX on Vanguard when people were fear mongering about not getting your money out of Robinhood.

Anyhoo steadily increasing my investing skills and now I see on Fidelity, where I have accounts, there are some cool trading tools, like Active Trader Pro. Thoughts on these? I assume it's more full-featured than Vanguard.

I do note a fee of a couple cents per $1000 on selling.

Here is the boilerplate:

$0.00 commission applies to online U.S. equity trades, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and options (+ $0.65 per contract fee) in a Fidelity retail account only for Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC retail clients. Sell orders are subject to an activity assessment fee (from $0.01 to $0.03 per $1,000 of principal). There is an Options Regulatory Fee (from $0.03 to $0.05 per contract), which applies to both option buy and sell transactions. The fee is subject to change. Other exclusions and conditions may apply. See Fidelity.com/commissions for details. Employee equity compensation transactions and accounts managed by advisors or intermediaries through Fidelity Clearing & Custody Solutions® are subject to different commission schedules.
Options trading entails significant risk and is not appropriate for all investors. Certain complex options strategies carry additional risk. Before trading options, please read Characteristics and Risks of Standardized OptionsOpens in a new window. Supporting documentation for any claims, if applicable, will be furnished upon request.
Backtesting on Fidelity.com is provided for educational purposes and as an example only, and should not be used or relied upon to make decisions about your individual situation. You should not assume that backtesting of a trading strategy will provide any indication of how your portfolio of securities, or a new portfolio of securities, might perform over time. You should choose your own trading strategies based on your particular objectives and risk tolerances. Be sure to review your decisions periodically to make sure they are still consistent with your goals.   
Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
Automated trading poses significant additional risks.  Use of Wealth-Lab Pro’s automated trading feature is subject to additional terms, conditions, and eligibility requirements.
Wealth-Lab Pro® is available to investors in households that place 36 or more stock, bond, or options trades in a rolling 12-month period and maintain $25K in assets across their eligible Fidelity brokerage accounts.
Solutions offered by Active Trader Services are available to investors in households that place 120 or more stock, bond, or options trades in a rolling 12-month period and maintain $250K in assets across their eligible Fidelity brokerage accounts.
System availability and response times may be subject to market conditions.

[reeshau]

Really I'm a buy and hold trader.

Umm...buy and hold *investor*, maybe?  Buy and hold trader sounds like an oxymoron.

[reeshau]

If you really are an investor, th3n run away from those trading tools.  They are geared toward pwop le watching their screens all day; to a discount broker, those are lik3 "whales" are to casinos, paying for everything.

Stick to analyzing the businesses underlying uour investments.  Stick to the timeframes you are really interested in:  years, and decades, not days and months.

Buy your investments for free, now.  No need to get fancy when you have your life and your money in order.  If you want a hobby, then put some fun money on the side, after you are FI. 

"In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine"
--Benjamin Graham

[MustacheAndaHalf]

Will you outperform professional fund managers?  Because the majority of them can't beat passive indexing.
https://www.ifa.com/articles/spiva_-year_2019_active_passive_scorecard/

Fund managers have millions of dollars to spend on tools and hiring full-time professionals.  Almost all of the advertising comes from active funds, but the data shows how well passive funds do in practice.

[Fru-Gal]

Not planning to. I believe in indexing. That's where my FU stash came from.

I like supporting industries that I believe in such as renewable energy as well as those I have insights into/done a lot of research on. I've also found some cool ETFs that are in areas I want to support. So far I've done well doing this.

I also think if we're going to all depend on indexing, it's good to understand the underlying market a little better. Especially considering there could be disruption due to increasing ML in trading.

So this was not me begging for an intervention, it was a question for anyone who was using these kinds of tools.

[reeshau]

Note:  I am not telling you that you need to index.  You can buy and sell, simply, on any discount broker platform.  Fidelity, Schwab, TD Ameritrade, etrade.  The "value add" trading tools are for people looking at technical metrics and trading intra-day.  From what you just said, the added cost is unnecessary.