You might be right. I was just pointing out that comparing his rates to IB or any other retail broker is not a good way to judge what he's paying.
We are talking prop firms. And I said (at least twice !) that my numbers DO NOT INCLUDE ECN CHARGES. Reading Comprehension 101. Class starts tomorrow.
So you guys beat the market for way more than 250k per year ? Kudos to you. BTW I now understand why many people do not share information on this board, people's reactions are completely and utterly absurd. Serves me right...
I know you traders who trade the millions and billions of shares per day get the best rates available. How about the average prop trader who does discretionary trading and not trying to be market makers. I'd like to hear from some of them. For example someone who has been trading for 6 to 12 months and does anywhere from 300k to 1 mm a month. What kind of costs do you have.
To answer this to the best of my knowledge, I would say that the only cost that actually varies is the commission or profit split. Regulatory fees are the same for everyone and ECNs are the same for everyone (unless your firm does extremely high volume). So the best way to compare costs is simply to state what our commission rate per share is, and if we have to split any of our profits in order to get that deal. I might be mistaken, but I think that pretty much all other costs involved in a trade (ECN, regs) are charged at the same rate for everyone. In that case, it's pretty simple, I get charged 0.20/1000 shares whether I trade 100k or 10M in a given month. And I have a profit split arrangement.
I'll probably piss someone off since I'm going to compare futures to equities, but oh well. If I'm doing my math right, 1 ES contract is roughly 500 shares of SPY currently. ES at (885*50)/SPY at 89.02. Then my commission divided by the 500 shares. My commission varies with volume, so I just took my 2nd level rate, all in. My average is less in reality, but close enough for this. I broke down my Ninja charge also and added it in to the mix. I get ~ 0.0078 per share. Now I've been working on studying for the Series 7 and am just about ready, and the options I looked at will be a fair amount cheaper, but I don't know if any of you figured in your yearly exchange dues and any follow up testing to renew the Series 7 every 2 years.