Hello my name is Treat
I am one of Tim's Millionaire Challenge students.

I am just like every one else. We are not born knowing this stuff. I had a little experience with a Scottrade account and assumed (stupidly) that Interactive Brokers would be similar in rules and operation.That was my first mistake. I was playing with real money and leaving it to chance that I knew what I was doing.

I was watching ECR from early in the morning and decided if it made a good move I would go long on a hundred shares on my 10k account. I pulled the trigger to buy at 9:40am. After I got in at 1.458 I started to look at the price action going up. Then the momentum started to falter and I decided to put in a sell order at 1.57 then one at 1.55 then the last one at 1.52 as the price came down. Chasing the price to get out of a trade not going my way. Now you have to understand that in Scottrade , you cannot put in an order that seems to copy another order or sell shares you don't own (short) unless you tell your account that is what you are trying to do. In this case I blissfully put in two sell orders thinking the other orders would be superseded and erased by the first to execute. I sold the 100 shares at 10:13 and got out with about $7 profit. Imagine my surprise when six minutes later, two sell orders go through. Short 100 shares at 1.55 , forty two seconds later Short 100 shares at 1.57 ,,, oh shit !  I am already over my 3 trade PDT limit and now I am short 200 shares. There is no way I can risk a spike / squeeze on my first day. I quickly entered a buy to cover my 200 shares that I accidentally shorted. I got out at 1.54. As soon as I am able to post my account/trades , you will be able to see what I did and why it was so stupid. It was not a lot of shares and the PPS was only 1.50 range but I could have wiped out my account in minutes if I had decided to be aggressive or if I got stopped on the wrong side of a short and ECR made a Super Nova run. In the end I left with a profit of about $10.70  for my first day. Some say a win is a win. I see this as a classic case of what not to do.

Interactive Brokers is a very powerful workstation and will be great once I know how to use it. I hope those that are like me will take the time to paper trade a few times and watch the instruction videos that Tim and Michael suggest before taking IB for a test drive.

As far as doing 5 trades in one day, I am not sure what will happen to my account but nothing so far.

Thanks for taking the time to read my overly long/short letter.

Treat Rayner