Hello all. I'm not allowed to open an account with a firm if it's not locally registered with our country's SEC directly, so pretty much every company is out, I either have to go with Saxo or move to Europe. I currently trade in a stock market where daily volume is ~$1.5 billion, so it's a little illiquid. I'll start with $250K and I qualify for Saxo's active trader criteria. For US stocks, they charge $6 flat fee if you buy less than 1000 shares and $0.007 per share if you buy more than 1000 once. This is already a good deal for me, but there's no harm trying to lower my costs. This would work great while trading stocks like Apple and Cisco in huge quantities, but if I buy 300 shares of a $8 stock I'd be paying $6 for $2400 worth of trade. That's a lot in terms of percentages. Saxo also charges 3.5% CFD financing fee for all markets while IB charges 1.9% for US (they charge A LOT LESS than 1.9% if your volume is big) and a lot less for some other markets. As far as I know, their costs are pretty much the same on this (don't they borrow at the FED rates?), but it doesn't mean Saxo will get close to 1.9% if I push hard enough. What do you think?
I know nothing about this topic other than to say you have little to lose asking. I know in the US I was only successful after spending some time actively trading. Side note. I have always been curious how much money you need to have / how much you need to trade to get deep discounts. I have heard really rich people pay close to nothing to trade. But how large does an account need to be to pay close to nothing? 50% of standard rates? 75% of standard rates? It's not transparent.