I would like to trade ETFs (US, EU, CH) and stocks (US, EU, CH, UK) no large volumes, and mainly for long term buying. Do you have any advice for minimizing the costs? What do you do?
The US equity and option datafeed is free if you do $30/month in commissions, and (last time I checked) it was possible to trade without subscribing to a data feed. What feeds do you find expensive and what do you think your amount of commissions per month will be?
well as for stocks I would like to "play with" UK, Germany, Italy, French, Spain, Swiss and US. And similar for the ETFs as most of them are located in US, Dublin or Germany. So, if I understood IB correctly I need/should to subscribe to Bolsa de Madrid 4 EUR Euronext Basic 5 EUR German Equities 15 EUR LSE 5 GDP MSF 12 EUR Stuttgart Boerse 4 EUR VIRTX/EBS 10 CHF Am I correct? I do not plan to have a volume that is larger then 50k USD. Is there a way to activate the data, do the order and remove the subscription? how other "small fishes" like me do?
You can trade off 15-minute delayed data free. I think this includes the European exchanges. TWS will say that it "recommends" that you have live data to trade but you can override the warning and place the trade. This may be enough for the kind of trading you are doing. For example, place a limit order at the open based on yesterday's close. I have done this with no problems.
I've never subscribed to the real time stocks. Maybe somebody from ib can answer. At the moment, all I trade with ib is FX. I generate quite a bit of commissions, but not in stocks or etfs. Will my forex commissions cover the $30 minimum for the real time stock feed?
It's not really a big deal to me, I trade my stocks and etf's with a different broker that has free real time. But I keep a few that I am watching on my ib screen (15 minutes delayed) and to be honest these are long term holds that I usually only check once a week on a Saturday. So like I said, I generate plenty of commissions, but was never sure if the commissions needed to be from the exchange you were subscribing to, or just commissions in general. It's not really worth it to me to pay $30/mo to get a real time quote on some stock I am probably be going to hold for years, especially when I can get it for free from the broker I made the trade with.
I suspect that European exchanges are not for free but I really hope to be wrong on that I noticed that I still have a couple of pending request, probably on monday they should be updated. I will keep you posted!
ib is usually pretty good about responding to questions on this board. Those of us who are long time customers give them shit about little itty bitty things, because they need to hear it. The point is, we shouldn't have to be asking these questions on the internet, it should be clearly explained on their website.
$10/month for inactivity, according to this...click on the "Activity" tab... http://individuals.interactivebrokers.com/en/p.php?f=minimumDeposits