Multiple accounts. You might be able to beat in pseudo way the PDT rules as it is different brokers offering the 3 round trips. Your buying power is very lessened, as you only had 10K to begin with but the flexibility is too important. Recent IFLG short is a good example. If you had had IB, Sogo Elite and TOS, you would have banked serious coin off it. You put all of it into IB, your balance is not going up at all because you never got a play on it short, likely. You can never predict which broker will have critical borrows, so you have to have several, period. Obviously if you had 25K, splitting them among 3 accounts is easier as you have *a lot* more buying power for each. There is no answer blindly here, it depends on several other factors, some of which I touched upon. Maybe you are under capitalized, which is the answer you did not want to hear...

dr0832, if your goal is to have all 3 immediately you should perform the following steps: Use the 10k to open an IB account. Make a trade after the funds clear then withdraw $6k from the account. Then simultaneously open a sogoelite or sogotrade account with $2500 and a thinkorswim account with the remaining $3500. To recap: (1) +10k bank (2) [-10K IB, clear, trade, +6K bank] (3) -2.5K sogo (4) -3.5k TOS

Flydown, if I had 30k I'd open the IB account with 25K then see if you can get thinkorswim to let you open an account with $2.5K (i've heard of TOS doing this for people who mentioned they already have other brokerage accounts and asked for a special exception) then use the other 2.5K to open a sogoelite or sogotrade.

Yah I'd try Sogotrade & Thinkorswim to double your chances of finding shares to short of gimmes and tell both I sent ya because i'm an affiliate

Another thing you should consider is that by splitting your money up into multiply accounts you will have pretty small buying power in each account meaning that you can only take small positions. It's a trade-off between being able to take larger positions and being able to trade more. If you are new to the game I'd suggest to limit your trading opportunities to few worthwhile ones and taking a reasonably large position instead of being able to trade more. That way you will be forced to be selective which will help to avoid overtrading. In my opinion it is a good school to go through. GentileBen suggest that you open multiple accounts. I do not agree with him. He reasons that Tim said you should open multiple accounts to have the most opportunities but Tim's statement is placed out of context. First Tim did only use one account to turn $12k into $25k and second Tim has experience at this and will most likely handle emotions and keeping overtrading under control much better than you as a novice. This means that he will utilize more trading opportunities much better than a beginning trader.

I'll add another to the open multiple accounts camp. When you can only take reasonably large positions but can't make as many decisions as you want, then the decision you go with is more luck - hoping that you get a worthwhile play - then intelligence. Even being wise about it, and cutting your losses quickly, will simple use up all your trades and get you flagged. Split the account so you can be flexible.

Nifri, As Tim's answer above demonstrates, I did not take his advice out of context. I see you voted me down, too! Man, that hurts!

I have to go with Big_T on this one...under capitalization can be a serious issue - I say pick the broker that you like best and put 8k into that...then put 2k into a second choice. Why? Because everytime you make ANY extra money send it to the second broker to build that fund up. It is eaiser to add money to a account once you HAVE that account...and a account with only 2k in it would annoy me more than a $0 account so I would tend to work harder to build it up. Or put 5k into one of the accounts and use the other 5K with a prop firm - again with the understanding that any/all profits are to be put to building up *real* accounts. Good luck with starting out - take it slow and easy!

And what if you had $30k? Would it be better to have 1 account and avoid the PDT rule, or open 3 different accounts and be limited to 9 trades a day?

Tim has answered before that it is better to have 2 or 3 accounts for that reason, so you can take advantage of the most trading opportunities without getting hit by the Pattern Day Trader rule. You never know when there might be 5 opportunities at the same time, or in the same week, and if you go in & out multiple times to take advantage of the spikes/drops, you will hit your limit with one account pretty fast, maybe even in one day. Tim has related that it took him 9 months to get 12,000 up to 25,000 to get around the PDT rule because he was limited in his trading ability. So open multiple accounts.