I've been trading for nine months and have spent 11K on brokers fees with e-trade. I've done some research myself and come up with interactive brokers as an alternative. If you've taken the time to read this and don't mind taking another minute to respond, can you please suggest a low fee broker with a good trading platform. Any and all input welcome including solicitations. Usually when I trade I add liquidity to the market. On e-trade I don't get any rebate for that. Any info on these rebates would also be appreciated. Thank you for your time.
InteractiveBrokers will give you the rebates if you use their unbundled fee structure. You also get lower comish on monthly volume (>300k shares or something). Downside could be the platform for you. You can use it with quotetracker for charting. I like the platform cuz I can have multiple orders at once. You can also use an API with Java, Excel, C++... Think or Swim may come as a second choice, I dont know them. Do you trade stocks or futures? What is your time frame for trades, daily, minutes...
i trade stocks, but looking into futures, heard the fees on futures is 2.95 a contract on etrade. i am a loser. a invested in the market at s&p 900 on jan 2nd and sold all positions some time in feb down at 750 and when it hit 666, i did not believe the rally and never rebought. lost 15k on that. 11k on fees and made about 4k day trading and lost 5k day trading so down 27k in 8 months. not good. but 11k in fees. way too much. on day trading, have set-ups. buy and put stops. win about 75% of the time, trade with 1000 shares, avg win about $110. losses are just stooooopid. made some real dumb physical errors and then compounded by mental errors. really stupid. anyway, thanks for the info, do u think IB is the best? $1 comm on trades of 100 shares, would change my whole style, give me a lot flexibility.