WOW 10 dollars!! so out of a 3480 dollars in premium collected selling 10 SPY puts, you save a whopping 10 bucks.
That's .50 a contract (each way) If you trade 300 contracts a day that is $150 a day or $36,000 a year. Not an insignificant amount.
$24 for 10 contracts at IB? That's a bogus number if you're trading Smart Routed in the US. It's anywhere from $3 to $14 for 10 contracts depending on your monthly volume and the premium per contract. And as mentioned previously, assignment and exercise are free and there's no pesky per trade fee that prevents legging in and out. There are a lot of things that are better at other retail brokers but commissions isn't one of them and in this case (TDA vs IB), it's a no brainer.
Yeh, what's $10 if you only make 2 or 3 trades a year? Hardly worth all the time it takes to fill out those complicated account application forms.
Nothing. But once upon a time I subscribed to their real time DJ News for $29.95 a month because it was the cheapest available - until I found a free source (got to TDA 10 yrs ago via a takeover of Datek Online). A nice feature was that you could color code 5 different lists (20 per) which enabled me to catch the highlighted symbol out of the corner of your eye while checking quotes, etc. - an improvement over the visually tiring reading every monochromatic line to find the symbols. Really good for spotting earnings announcements and breaking news. Your next question should be, why keep them open if you moved on? Ever have your broker's ISP crash and leave you out there hanging, unable to transact? Phone lines jam up pretty quick and you're in line for a possible screwing since their failure is YOUR $$$ loss. Not necessarily a big problem for an investor or a 1 month option writer but for a trader, could be. IMHO, it's a good idea to have a back up account that you can fund quickly (I have branches near me). Odds of this happening may be slim but I remember the crash of '87 when some of my brokers were totally unavailable for days. Won't help with an online broker down for an hour or so (which has happened to me in recent years). I also have 2 high speed services since they go down as well (never both at the same time, yet). It's a lousy feeling when you have 15-20 open orders not far from current price and you have no clue what's been filled.