Oh please. Ameritrade etc. don't charge for the data because they cost $8.95 a trade! Go take a look at IB's commissions for comparison. IB doesn't even require you to buy the data if you don't want to. It's certainly not their fault that they're no longer allowed to offer their BATS feed. WRT the regulations, they are just so...bizarrely paternalistic. I mean, they've always been a bit paternalistic (see for example the 25k day trading minimum), but this is just bizarre. It's weird enough that it makes me wonder who bribed the regulator. My pet theory is that some major exchange must have been furious at other exchanges like BATS selling their data for cheap, so they wanted to make it so their own data had to be purchased as well by regulation.
I have been paying $4.50/month since 12/2014. I also had the U.S Securities & Futures Value Bundle for Non-Professionals, which I now suspect I may not have needed. I just sent a message to IB asking for clarification. The prompt reply said that I will get streaming quotes for all U.S. stocks, which is what I need. I still don't know whether I need the U.S. Securities Snapshot & Futures Value Bundle for Non-Professionals, but I will try first without it.
I guess trading without data is not a big deal for you. Ameritrade is charging $6. OptionsHouse is charging $4.95.
Since I can't figure out what I need I'll just let the data get canceled and see what doesn't work. (Well, I do but I can't map it to a particular set of checkboxes) Data subscription changes happen almost immediately anyway.
True. But then again they can just straight up charge a maintenance fee per quarter. Or they can raise interest rates. Or they can outright raise commission.
So what's the TL & DR instructions then? What needs to be done to get it back to the old state as it were before? Buy the $4.5 package and now it's the same as before? I'm not gonna subscribe until after they implement the change to see what changed.
Maybe you're able to negotiate lower commissions or something, but TD Ameritrade on their website advertises $10/trade. OptionsHouse is indeed $4.95, which happens to be 4.95 times what I normally pay per trade on Interactive Brokers.
The "old state" was a BATS only data feed. You can't go back to that. It's not allowed by the regulators anymore. If you buy the $4.50 feed (which consists of 3 packages -- NYSE listed quotes, NASDAQ listed quotes, and AMEX listed quotes), you'll get a NBBO from all exchanges. That's a superset of what you had before, which was an NBBO from BATS exchanges.