Well, it totally depends on what type of trader you are... if you are a swing trader, perhaps you have a decent or good edge in that you only need a trade every few days, which would only be, say, 50$ per week, or 200$ per month, or 1000$ But of course when you start being forced to break orders up so as not to shock the market, or trading premarket, or routing fees, or whatnot, then yes, that 5K isn't much at all. What also matters, of course, is your edge. Perhaps you have such a great trading edge, that you only need a couple of trades to make a killing... in that case, you wouldn't have much of a bill in commissions anyway. I think one way to tell the size of your edge is based on a few bits of data 1) Account size 2) Profit$ (Percent%) this year 3) Commissions $ (Percent of profit$). g
OTOH, I looked at my Bofa account, which is about 70% of the size of my Etrade account, but I trade much less frequently on that one... I have 100K$ in profits on that one, but it only cost me 3K$ in commissions. hmmm... g
Ummm yeah not so much... Sometimes some of the best trades that I do cost the least... Made 133,000$ off RPRX this past week and the commish between both Bofa and ET account was probably 400$ total. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2822732#post2822732 puts me up to ~420,000$ for the year... g