What about FUTURES-OPTIONS? I went through the outfits listed above and some of them do offer a limited amount. But not on the coffee, cocoa, and agricultural futures-options that I want to trade. Tradestation does allow me to send orders to the pits, but they want to charge $13 PER CONTRACT! Yikes! Any good deals on futures-options? Thanks
DannoXYZ, if you trade fut opts on the underlyings you mentioned, these $13 won't be your problem. The rip-off you will encounter when trading these (illiquid) series throu the pits will be multiple times worse than what you pay in commish. -> Go find another vehicle.
Any suggestions on better underlyings futures? I've only been doing this for a month and had to go with PFG with the low $3k starting capital I had. Doubled that to $6k now, so I'm shopping for better brokers. I've been making decent 200-300% returns on cocoa, coffee, sugar, corn, wheat, soy, etc. Yeah, slippage and spreads are horrible, as is high commissions with PFG. I'm trying to trim those down. Even then the different between squeezing 200-300 into 220-330% returns isn't gonna be that great anyway. Missed out on crude today.
These guys claim flat rate. If you are trading size then I guess unlimited equity options for $20-$25 is good. http://www.eregal.com/commissions.htm Options: Equity (Unlimited Contracts) Market Orders $19.95 Limit Orders $24.95 Index Per Contract $1.00 Minimum $19.95 Limit Orders Additional $5.00 Option rates apply to each side of a spread order.
I am a professional trader and was formerly on the "street"....There are quite a few firms that have good tools for order execution, so you should look at your normals, TradeStation, Think or Swim, Options Express, MB Trading and Terra Nova. I think if you want to find the lowest price on the street for Options you need to find firms that specialize in options and its probably a plus if they are located in Chicago(more professional traders, ex floor traders) as they are the option capital of the world and naturally they would have more volume, thus lower costs. So you can eliminate El Segunda based MB Trading for the nature of this excercise. Then you should look for firms that are OCC members, so although I like Think or Swim, if you are looking solely for low price then you are left with only Options Express, TradeStation and Terra Nova. Which are all self-clearing and OCC Members. http://www.optionsclearing.com/about/member_listing_stat.jsp The importance of OCC is that there costs are even lower then non OCC members. Next you want to look for a firm that offers you routing to each and every exchange - truly the most important thing when you are looking for best price - thus eliminating Options Express ( If you dont have choice of regional exchanges, you could stand to lose alot, there are differences of anywhere from .05 to .15 differences between these 6 exchanges which means $5 to $15 dollars per contract - a way these other online brokers make money ( ameritrade, etrades, scottrades etc). So technically you could bring back Think or Swim for this reason, so take your pick TOS or Terra Nova..
Check out these folks: http://optionshouse.com/home/jsp/index.jsp Flat $9.95 per trade, no contract fees. Each leg of a spread represents a trade, though. Only equity options, I don;t believe you can do options on futures but I may be wrong. I opened a demo account, but it was way too retail for me.
crimony, Check out: http://www.just2trade.com/html/j2t_optionstrading.php OPTIONS COMMISSION: $2.50 per trade plus $.75 per contract I hope this helps. Tom
When it comes to trading options on Futures, the industry is far behind in this electronic age. Almost all commodity options are traded in the pit which makes wider spreads and high commissions. After searching for 3 years, (and trading mainly with xpresstrade, which was recently bought by optionsxpress), I have found 5perside.com as the best option rate. As their name suggests, they charge only $5 per side (except NY exchange contracts). Note that most of the commodity options brokers (including xpresstrade) charge round turn options contract fees upfront. 5perside charges only per side. I sell FOTM naked options, and most of them expire worthless. I do not pay anything for the expired side. I went with 5perside as the biggest backing they have is that it is a Man Financial's part.