Can I work with two or more mortgage brokers at the same time?
While it is possible, it's not a really good use of your time or theirs. Mortgage brokers have access to dozens of lenders, can assemble deals you can't even dream of, and are much more intimately acquainted with the latest lending rule changes than you are. They are paid by the lenders to bring them business, so there is no cost to you. A mortgage broker has the advantage of leverage because he can be placing 10 mortgages per day, while you will be placing one, once.  Your mortgage broker is working on your behalf. Get out of his way and let him do his job so you can concentrate on other matters. If your concern is that you want the lowest rate, share that with your broker and let him find the best rate for you. If you want a deal where you can put a larger prepayment down, let him know that and he will find you what you're looking for. Obviously mate. Mortgage advisors don't have just one client, similarly why should you have only one advisor? it´s an open market. Don't worry about wasting their time, you are not wasting their time if you are considering a mortgage. then, in case you found a better deal with another mortgage advisor then that´s life - someone was better then them.
While most all Canadian brokers allow us access to all the US stocks, the reverse is not true.  But some US brokers DO allow trading on foreign exchanges. (e.g. Interactive Brokers at which I have an account).  You have to look and be prepared to switch brokers.  Americans cannot use Canadian brokers (and vice versa). Trading of shares happens where-ever two people get together - hence the pink sheets.  These work well for Americans who want to buy-sell foreign stocks using USD without the hassle of FX conversions.  You get the same economic exposure as if the actual stock were bought.   But the exchanges are barely policed, and liquidity can dry up, and FX moves are not necessarily arbitraged away by 'the market'.  You don't have the same safety as ADRs because there is no bank holding any stash of 'actual' stocks to backstop those traded on the pink sheets. You're right to keep the oldest one.  That's an asset to your credit rating. Since you're already responsible with your credit, a dip in your credit rating doesn't really matter unless you're looking for another loan, like a mortgage. I personally like the cash-back rewards because they're the most flexible, so you have a good thing going with that card. Do those reward cards give you perks on all of your purchases?  If they do, then look carefully to see if you can do noticeably better with another card.  If not, it may not really be worth it. Regarding cancelling one of the cards, I wouldn't, and here's why.  Your cards can get compromised, and sometimes more than one gets compromised at the same time.  I was glad that I had three cards, because two of them got hit the same day.  Hence, having three cards hit on the same day is possible, and you'll be glad that you have the fourth. "What do I mean by infrastructure? Well, if you're doing algorithmic trading, you have to have something monitoring data and making decisions on its own, presumably. How do you set that up? There are many ways, and some are better than others.  First is a problem of scale. If you're a newbie starting out with some small set of equity tick data, perhaps just trades for instance, you can whip together something that can handle that pretty easily. Check out http://www.marketdatapeaks.com/ though. That's your messaging rates you have to deal with once you go full data feeds direct from all the exchanges. 6.65 million messages/events per second. That's a lot. And if you fall behind, you lose your lunch.  Building a robust system that allows you to easily backtest and deploy strategies is crucial as well. The speed at which you're able to conduct the backtest matters a lot. Doing that rapidly, and accurately is not easy. For a broad market-data handling algo design (and now, clearly, for very specific things you can design one that'll handle stuff better for that one corner case, but this is for general algo trading), optimally you have some sort of setup where you have a:  [feed handlers] -&gt; [tickerplant] -&gt; [mkt data subscribers/CEP] -&gt; [order management system] -&gt; [broker]   in this setup you have feed handlers that are taking the raw exchange feeds and pushing them to a consolidated tickerplant, where CEP subscribers can come through and sub to the data they want (perhaps I just want ES futures on one, and only want to arb CMCSA and CMCSK on another -- you dont want each CEP subscriber getting your full feed for all tickers all the time, its a waste). so more or less, each independent strategy is its own subscriber to the tickerplant, taking whatever data it wants and only that data (could be ""give me all the trades and quotes for all nasdaq stocks, but not book depth"" for instance).  your CEP does whatever maths it has to do to figure out trading decisions, and when it does, it sends it to your order management system which does your risk checks, etc (""do you have enough money to place this trade?"" ""do you already have a position in this?"" ""are you trading against yourself?"" ... million other things). your OMS knows how to talk to your broker/directly to the exchange depending on your setup. Assuming all your risk checks pass, off the order goes to the exchange, and it deals with the fill msgs, etc.  Now, as far as speed is concerned - try to do all of this at 6.5 million events/second. It's hard. Some strats/cep subscribers will run faster than others, some are slower, some need to keep a full book to work while some work on just trades. Your OMS depending on if youre using only market data sources may need to keep its own book to place orders on behalf of your subscribers if they lack information about various markets (think all the twitter trading bots these days for instance), etc.  If you look back at the above setup as well, you'll notice some interesting things. [tickerplant] -&gt; [cep subscriber] portion can stay the same for live trading or backtesting. This is huge. The only thing that changes here for backtesting is that if you're trying to backtest, you can take historical data (query it out of your hopefully column-store database) and push it into your tickerplant rather than having it come from a live feed through the feed handler. Your tickerplant and cep subscriber will never know the difference, so you can use the same exact code for backtesting as you can for live. On the other end, you obviously cant send historical orders to your live broker, so you need to code a simulated OMS that does the backtest simulation (another huge piece of software to code that is hard to do well). But, for backtesting, your setup is staying largely the same except those two end pieces. This means that testing/deving/deploying strats can be pretty rapid, and uses the same code base for live and historical, which helps you eliminate bugs and have to code everything twice.  Backtesting design: [historical mkt data db] -&gt; [tickerplant] -&gt; [mkt data subscribers/CEP] -&gt; [order management system simulator/backtester]  These are just a few of the many problems that you hit when trying to dev good infra. There are like a million more. Point was simply, it's complicated. And C++ is a good lang. I use a wide variety of languages depending on exactly whats going on and how fast the code needs to be. With a proper tickerplant design, youre using some ipc protocol so a subscriber can be coded in any language. Check out http://www.zeromq.org/ -- thats an excellent piece of software to use to make a tickerplant out of, think they even have a design for one in the docs if I recall. With that, your CEP subscribers can be in any language - perhaps pure C if you need the speed, perhaps .NET or Java if you dont (check out http://esper.codehaus.org/ for a Java implement of a CEP subscriber, nEsper for the C# port of that I believe). But I use C, C++, C#, python, R, x86 asm for a few very minor things, and a lang or two I can't mention here." "Here in the U.S., a realtor can act as a ""seller's agent"" or a ""buyer's agent"". I think what you are calling a ""broker"" in the U.S. we call a ""buyer's agent"", and this may just be a difference in terminology, from your post it sounds like the concept is the same. I am answering from a U.S. perspective, please let me know if something doesn't make sense in the Israeli context. Here, each typically gets 3% to 3.5% of the sale price (at least in my part of the country). So yes, the buyer's agent has an incentive to get a higher price, even though this is contrary to the interests of the person he is supposed to represent. On the other hand, the buyer's agent has a strong incentive to find a house at a price that you consider acceptable. If the absolute most you are willing to pay is, say, ₪1,000,000, and he keeps showing you houses that cost ₪1,500,000, he's just wasting his time. (He's wasting your time too, of course, but let's assume he doesn't care about that.) (I don't know what housing prices are in Israel today, just making up numbers.) Suppose he has two houses that he can show you, one in your price range and one not. If he shows you the first you may buy it and we will very quickly get his commission. If he shows you the second, you probably won't buy it and he'll get zero. If he keeps showing you houses above your price range, he's doing a bunch of work for which he will never be paid. The worst case from your point of view is if you're thinking that you're expecting and prepared to pay, say, ₪1,000,000 to ₪1,300,000, and you tell the broker that, his incentive is to concentrate on the upper end, maybe even push it a little. But still, if he shows a house that's well within your range so you'll quickly buy, he can get ₪30,000 today, versus trying to push you to go higher so he can maybe get ₪39,000 in a few months. Is the extra ₪9,000 worth several months of extra work? Probably not. Personally, I've never had a problem with a realtor trying to push me to buy a house more expensive than I said I was prepared to pay. At least not that I noticed. Maybe they were very skillful at it and I didn't realize they were doing it, like showing me houses that were totally run-down dumps until I decided I was willing to pay more. As to your specific suggestion: I don't know if a realtor would be willing to negotiate an alternative deal from their standard contract. I've never tried to do such a thing. Yes, this would give him an incentive to find the lowest possible price. Arguably this would create a perverse incentive to show you houses of very low quality just because they're cheap. And there would be the problem that he'd have no incentive to show you houses at or just over your stated maximum, as his commission would be zero. (Negative if it goes over slightly?) What I did on my last house was tell the realtor, I want to start by looking at houses costing under \$X. If I can't find anything I like, I'll go a little higher. By not telling the realtor my maximum, I discouraged her from immediately going for the maximum. At least that was my theory." Street name is not what you think it is in the question.  The broker is the owner in street name.  There is no external secondary owner information.   I don't know if there is available independent verification, but if the broker is in the US and they go out of business suddenly, you can make a claim to the SIPC. Yea I know they are. I want to get them out of the way though and my firm gives me the support to take whatever. Cfp I'm looking at a year or more of studying. 9/10 I could crank out in a couple of months. Not sure if I want to go management or consultant route. But thank you! Are you allowed to have two personal current accounts with a debit card attached to each one? Yes, you may have as many current accounts you want, but you should ask why should I have more than one. It is cumbersome and time consuming to keep track of ongoing incoming credits and outgoing debits. Open to bank fraud too, if you aren't careful. If yes, can a sole trader in the UK use the second personal account for business transactions? Yes, but no payments to the business. At the end of the year you file you P11D, even if you have a business bank account. You would need to justify the expenses by keeping the bills and stuff. As it will be a personal account, you have to little more careful, not to mix personal and business expenses.  If you are allowed to use a second personal account for business transactions, then why would someone choose to open a business bank account, where you have to pay? What are the benefits? First of all no company will pay into you personal account, for any transactions, they need to pay you. They will only pay to an account registered with the business, with whom they are dealing with. Benefits are you have your business expenses sorted out in one account and personal expenses in other. Pure business expenses comes out of the business account, rather than from your personal purse, keeps the accounts smooth. No need to sort out expenses at the end of each quarter or at the end of each month. Here's how this works in the United States. There's no law regarding your behavior in this matter and you haven't broken any laws. But your broker-dealer has a law that they must follow. It's documented here: The issue is if you buy stock before your sell has settled (before you've received cash) then you're creating money where before none existed (even though it is just for a day or two). The government fears that this excess will cause undue speculation in the security markets. The SEC calls this practice freeriding, because you're spending money you have not yet received. In summary: your broker is not allowed to loan money to an account than is not set-up for loans; it must be a margin account. People with margin account are able to day-trade because they have the ability to use margin (borrow money). Margin Accounts are subject to Pattern Daytrading Rules. The Rules are set forth by FINRA (The Financial Industry Reporting Authority) and are here: