I learned to trade in 1998 on a platform called CyberTrader. I loved that platform, but soon enough, Schwab came along and bought all the rights to it and renamed it....guess what....Street Smart. It's been tweaked and recoded, and a lot of the features have just been plain removed, but it's still basically CyberTrader.

This was a platform that would let you naked short sell into the bid, on any stock you wanted, without marking your order short. We could preference MMs anywhere we wanted on either side and print whatever price we wanted. There were smart keys we could set up to hit preferred MMs first.

It was wide open trading. All the responsibility to follow the rules was on the trader. The keystrokes had better functions too. I used a smart key for about 70% of my orders and preference keys for most of the others. I could focus all my buys on one MM or hit every one of them for a chunk.

When I demoed Street Smart Edge, 5 or 6 years ago, I was disappointed with all the changes, but it's still a decent platform.

Blast from the past right there. Trading today is very different. Anybody remember fractions?