I am currently paying $5 per round trip in my tos and $4.42 in my mirus accounts. I am in the process of opening an account at lightspeed as it seems like their round trip rate is $3.50 per ES contract. But customer service there kind of seems to such (just based on a couple of phone calls i had thus far). So are there better options. I actually like both my tos and mirus accounts; dont want to sacrifice on quality but want to see if i can reduce my monthly commisions. More info: My current volume is around 120 round trips per month. But i expect it to go up as i am soon expanding into a couple of other instruments; to say maybe 160 roundtrips per month. thanks! -gariki
ib? re lightspeed, i thought about using them but am hesitant for two reasons: 1) ninjatrader won't connect to them and i'm positive about this and 2) you can't enter oco orders with them but i'm not sure. can you confirm the second part? to my knowledge lightspeed has the lowest non negotiated commissions out there (and prob lower than most traders' negotiated commissions.
IB is around 4$ roundturn; i used to think there was order cancellation fee at IB but i just called them and thats only for options. And from a chat with LS rep, it does look like i can put bracket orders. But thats not a deal breaker for me. And yes; LS looks like the one with lowest commisions out there. For stocks also IB is about 0.005/sh but they dont passthrough rebates; LS at 0.0045-rebates is like half of IBs price. -gariki
on a related note; i was with IB about 4-5 years ago or so. and i hate their software; buggy and slow i used to think. But it has been a while and maybe they have improved. But eversince, everytime the road ends up at IB i take a step back. -gariki
Nope. What i mean was even if i cannot it would have been ok for me (currently on my free Ninja platform i cant do it either). One bad thing about Lightspeed is even intraday they require about 5k to hold one ES contract. I need only like a fraction of it in my other accounts (1500 on tos and 500 at mirus). -gariki
In my experience $5 is about average for the ES. High $4s is as good as you're going to get without compromising service. My broker works a scale commission rate based on volume and I've always been happy with their service. Check them out: http://www.cannontrading.com/price-commissions.php
i actually opened a Lightspeed account this week and have also closed it out (no ladder on their platform). Velocity sounds like round trip is around 3.50 and they offer a sierra charts that has a ladder also. Not sure how good it is etc; am going to give them a shot sometime (maybe). But you are right; around 4-5 dollars is where everybody is. -gariki
it's important to look at every factor not just price. http://www.deepdiscounttrading.com/ has ridic low commissions but if you don't trust the fin stability of their clearing firm (they're just an ib) then it doesn't matter if the commission is $0.01. that's why a lot of people go w/ ib. yes you could save some money on commissions elsewhere but you give up so many HUGE benefits (security w/ key fob, fin security, breadth of products, etc). i'm not an ib rep just trying to help traders out as they consider which broker to use.
by ib do you mean interactive brokers or "introducing broker". Agree with your statement that cost is not everything which is why i am trying to find someone reliable but paying as low as i can. i am also looking now at velocity with sierra (round trip around 3.50). -gariki