257: FINRA

Some kind of trading stocks may make you designated as a "pattern day trader" and that leads to having some special conditions imposed on your account. I already had some knowledge about the related rule but I still wanted to get more information. So I went to the FIRNA website and after searching for the words "day trader" (without the quotes) I found This. As you see, it says that the action that can lead to have that designation applied on you is if you "buy and sell (or sell and buy)" the same stock at the same day. That seems clear enough and ready to be followed rule from FIRNA website itself,  right? I could have seen it as such had I not already knew that it is not the same for selling and buying a stock as it is for buying and selling a stock. Initially I thought that the rule could have changed. Following the links provided in the article did not help me but doing a search at the SEC site confirmed my understanding. So I came back and wanted to find that support from the FIRNA site and did a search for "day trade" (without the quotes) and found This. Read the "exception" mentioned in the "What is a day trade?" (internal quotes omitted) paragraph. It clearly excludes selling then buying the same stock in the same day if the stock was held overnight. So unless it is for some corrupt reason, who in good faith would write the information in that earlier article and miss pointing out this? One may wonder about doing such a thing even if this missing information is considered an exception but why would buying the stock any other day be the exception to buying the stock on the same trading day, instead of things being the other way around?

What could that corrupt reason be? My guess is that it is for the same reason this whole "pattern day trader" designation was created to begin with. I think that without this rule, day traders may make the work of hedge funds and other big financial institutions on stocks to accumulate them from the hands of individual holders, significantly more difficult. 
I missed this, but actually it seems that with the "exception" mentioned in the second article everything would be covered with the buying then selling order without any need to mention the other way around unless the reference is to short selling and that may make things even more suspicious for being expressed that way. 

Note: The designation could be about the same shares not just the same stock as I described it here.