This is extremely annoying. And getting ridiculous. I use to have HSI (Heng Seng Index) & SPX, now additional fees are charged for each. Their futures platform is really bad too. This is esp bad when you trade after work at night. Datafeed keeps breaking up. Their platform is a gigantic resource consumer too. It slows everything else and freezes my system sometimes.
I think they are just passing on new fees from the exchange, would it make you feel better if they ate that and then raised commissions instead? What is slightly more annoying to me is their $10 minimum commission a month as my trading methodology does not always make a lot of trades but it's still not that much dough, more of an irritation as I almost always have to pay the $10 for the data feed already. If this wasn't such a low interest rate environment I wouldn't really care.
Are you sure these are exchange fees and not IB fees? Other brokers has not raised the fees. I have my my IRA with with IB in which I do a few swing trades now and then. For daytrades, I use Infinity. Infinity doesn't charge me for Russell index or for any of the extra tickers I wish to add.
This is a pass-along of some new fee from the exchange, and they did give everybody plenty of warning when they announced the new fee back in October or November, if I recall correctly. Having said that, I think it's ridiculously petty of them to nickel-and-dime us like this. They should definitely cover the fee for any trader who does a thousand or more in annual commissions, imo.
So why there was no pass-along charge for the prior fees coming from the exchange: I believe exchange applies fees all the time to a broker who has access to their data. Or more likely they have free access to the data and exchange charges transaction fees. http://www.cboe.com/publish/feeschedule/CBOEFeeSchedule.pdf
Agree, they do seem to be much more fee happy now since they have gone public. I don't know how much of that is related to general economic conditions and loss of revenue from there being less traders then during the bubble(s) though.
Excellent point. And at the end of the day, it's only a coupla bucks. But as a loyal and well-paying client, it's a fee I'm not willing to pay. There are plenty of other brokers who do not pass along these fees, and as of Jan. 1st I've chosen to get my data through one of them. You all should do the same.
To be honest, I've been using index data from elsewhere for years, and it's been working out just fine. It was just that having it also available through IB was something I found convenient at times. But thanks for your well-wishing. edit: I realize this may make my earlier comment of "as of Jan 1st I've chosen to get my data .... " seem disingenuous. A better (more thorough) choice of words would've been: " As of Jan 1st I've chosen to opt out of the IB fee-based index data package and continue to receive free index data through another broker as I have been doing for some time". ... Apologies.