I've been looking at the possibility of trading European stocks/etf's lately but keep coming up against 2 main roadblocks. One is the fact that European commissions, even thru IB are 5 times more than in US. This prohibits most intraday strategies. What's the main reason for the expensive commish? Are there government/exchange fees being paid and included in the ripoff commissions? #2 is something I don't quite understand either...Why does Xetra and EuroNext have some 200-300 etf's, yet most of them do like, 15 trades a day or less. Volume on those things suck and the bid-ask spreads are horrible. Looks like they are designed only to take business away from mutual funds. Anybody out there trading euro stocks/etf's who can comment on the above? I'm not interested in futures.
That's it, I have seen it too. I was surprised, such economy and finance, but slow market and stock exchange, why? A.T.