I am fed-up paying $0.65 per contract (IB, TD, Schwab...) and am now looking for alternatives. The purpose of this thread is to collect everyone's experience when dealing with smaller shops. Namely: 1) Segregation or recoveries if broker goes under. 2) Customer service (or lack of) 3) Platform 4) International Accounts 5) If an Excel API is provided I have identified 3 interesting ones to look further at Tradier (Capped at $85 with platform), tastyworks (capped at $10 per trade) and Firstrade ($0, really?) I have already ruled out Choicetrade based on the very poor feedback, and am quite intrigued by Firstrade. Looking forward to read your contribution.
@tonyf , I'm glad you started this thread. As a fellow Brit, I am also paying a lot in comms, and we don't have the same brokers available to us as our US cousins. I'm with IB, and pay $thousands every month. I trade a lot of multi-leg options strategies and this had a cost. I'd love to know if Tradier is now available to us - when I checked a couple of years ago, they were not. I had Tastyworks on my 'to-do' list but haven't gotten around to contacting them. There is a broker here called RobertMorse who wrote this, but I am looking for something even cheaper - moving from 0.65 to 0.45 may be something I do once I have exhausted the other possibilities (like fixed fee): https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...of-our-trading-platforms.346844/#post-5140472
Re. Tradier: have a look at the question I have just raised here: https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/tradiers-optionsbrew-coming-soon.347283/#post-5178990 To me Tradier looks good but is dead-on-arrival if they are asking for $1k on top of Firstrade.
Morse is a cool guy - I have seen his valuable comments on many posts (not always pushing his employer like others do). But I don't think they bring anything new to the table really. The way I see it, we are dealing with 2 types of execution styles: 1) Pure-DMA with smart routing and access to some dark pools: IB and Fidelity in the online space. 2) orderflow sellers to APEX, Citadel and other HFTs: many others from Schwab (Intl) all the way down to Choicetrade My approach is to now have one account with each group. It is that second group that this post is targeting.
If you are willing to transfer some money/assets into your brokerage account, most offers zero commissions for options, at least for a couple of years.
The problem is that we live in the UK - many brokers like Tradier, TDAmeritrade, etc do not accept clients from this country.
IB, TD, Schwab, Fidelity, (Morgan Stanley...Hand holding), will NOT be cheap. They all will give you customer service of some kind...Some good, some bad. You have to pay for that...$.65. There is no free lunch!! You say I want customer service...You will pay that company $40,000.-$60,000. for that employee (pay, benefits, training, license) to get an quality answer...Or they will bump it up to someone who really knows. You say, "I want cheap, good customer service, and fast-effective trades"! You can have two out of the three. But for all three...English term...YOU HAVE GOT TO PAY THE PIPER!!