Gyroscopic Investing

Do you place market orders or limit orders at Fidelity. I never tried that market order that "gets fulfilled through a third party" at Fidelity. Do you get a good price?

Also, do you think that representative assisted trade is worth 19.95? Can they get better price than what we can get for, for example, an exchange of significant number of 24 yrs to 30 yrs bonds?

Ime market prevents waiting all day for a full and the price is good.  After using a few other retail platforms I really appreciate fidelity

For example, tdameritrade took all day and the spread was multiple percent

I'll second what dragoncar wrote. With Fidelity the bond transaction happens almost instantly and the price is extremely close to whatever the market says it should be at any given moment. I had the same experience with TD Ameritrade... waited a few hours to sell several bonds and the price changed in the meantime (and not in a good direction). Now I hold TLT with TD and individual bonds with Fidelity. In my case, most of my investible money is with Fidelity so it's not a big deal.

Using a representative could be fine at first but I THINK you can usually get someone to help you without paying for it. And when you get another party involved, it's possible that they gum up what you are trying to do. For example, when I was first getting set up with TD Ameritrade a couple of years ago, the rep who was helping me to navigate their site strongly recommended against buying long bonds because "interest rates were going to be headed up."

Thanks, so you are telling me you were happy buying/selling with the following options selected:

-Market
-Fill or Kill

as opposed to selecting options

-Limit Price
-Day

Also, does anyone know what is this Third-Party Price indicated and what is it relevant for compared to the also indicated Real Time Quote

Third Party Price: depicts a security’s price formulated from a 3rd party vendor’s proprietary pricing methodology. To establish this modeled price, a host of factors such as recent trade activity, size, timing, and yields of comparable bonds are used. In the case of a comparable bond comparison, the vendor assigns a "fair market" yield to the security, then extrapolates a representative price based on the fair market yield assigned. In many cases, this modeled price provides price discovery and transparency for bonds that may not have traded for days, months or even years. Understandably, in scenarios where a security hasn’t traded recently, attempting to accurately predict the “market price” can be a challenging endeavor. Nevertheless, the vendor prices bonds on a daily basis. Please Note: Given the nature of the modeled pricing provided, it is not accurate to characterize such pricing as a “closing price” or to suggest that the price was based on specific recent (prior day's end of day) trading activity.

LazyInvestor wrote: Do you place market orders or limit orders at Fidelity.~

I've always just used market orders, accepting that even when I'm not trading the prices don't exactly what I have in my google drive sheets.

Also, do you think that representative assisted trade is worth 19.95?

Only if someone had a lot of bonds to trade. I pay $0 at Vanguard and I pay $8 or $9 to trade non-treasuries at Fidelity, so I'm grateful that I can trade treasuries at fido for free.

I think the third party price is how they update their NAV (or equivalent) at the end of the day.  I always noticed that intraday activity was never reflected in my portfolio summary for bonds.

But yeah, I always did market because I understood that the market for treasuries is super-liquid.  That may or may not actually be true for specific issues, but it worked well for me compared to other brokerages.  If you are not in a hurry you could try limit.

Or do an experiment and do half at market half at limit and let us know which you liked better.  I don't think there is a wrong answer.

That said, market always scares me a little because it's true you can't Know what might happen

There was another thread on mechanics of buying bonds where this was briefly discussed as well if you choose to find it

dragoncar wrote: There was another thread on mechanics of buying bonds where this was briefly discussed as well if you choose to find it

Here's one: http://gyroscopicinvesting.com/forum/pe ... -buy-them/
I found it by searching for "new bond smell" 

dualstow wrote:

dragoncar wrote: There was another thread on mechanics of buying bonds where this was briefly discussed as well if you choose to find it

Here's one: http://gyroscopicinvesting.com/forum/pe ... -buy-them/
I found it by searching for "new bond smell" 

I was thinking of this one: http://gyroscopicinvesting.com/forum/bo ... -tutorial/

Thanks for links!