Are you talking about this page? http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/accounts/fees/commission.php?ic=1&p=stk So can you help me how I was charged $0.27 for 100 shares of LEH via SMART and $0.97 for 100 shares of LEH also via SMART? These were partial fills of 1000 share buy market order via SMART. 700 shares were purchased via SMART and 300 went through either ARCA or ISLAND. That's what TWI Trades Window showed. It just says "SMART" under exchanges in the Trades Window, so how am I supposed to figure out how the fees were calculated? What am I missing here?
to get to the bottom of it you have to take a look into your audit statements. it will show you,where exactly your order is executed,when routed as smart. this one- http://individuals.interactivebrokers.com/en/accounts/fees/CSFBPCROSSstkfee.php?ib_entity=llc adds 0.0025 to every share,regardless to adding\removing liquidity. i spend almost half a day with Samaritan and he said, that they will remove this dark pool from smart routing at least temporarily.
Alright, so I downloaded the Account Statement from yesterday, and double-checked the trade I mentioned in my earlier posts. In the statement, I found out that that mysterious SMART order went through CSFBCROSS as follows. Looking at the fees for CSFBCROSS, I see that $0.0025 is charged whether you add or remove liquidity. http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/accounts/fees/CSFBPCROSSstkfee.php?ib_entity=llc But look at what happened to my fees: ___LEH 2008-07-29, 12:15:44 CSFBCROSS 100 15.92 16.88 1,592.00 -0.97 1,592.97 0 96 P;O ___LEH 2008-07-29, 12:15:44 CSFBCROSS 100 15.92 16.88 1,592.00 -0.27 1,592.27 0 96 P;O ___LEH 2008-07-29, 12:15:44 CSFBCROSS 100 15.92 16.88 1,592.00 -0.62 1,592.62 0 96 P;O I got charged $0.97, $0.27, $0.62. All were executed at the same price at the same time. Why such a difference? EDIT: It should've been $0.62 for each of those 100 shares it looks like. I don't know why it wouldn't add commission of $0.0035 to each transaction more consistently instead of double-adding to one and not adding to another.
I use the unbundled commissions but I also almost always add liquidity to my orders and almost never use smart. It is my understanding that if your taking liquidity you would be better off using the fixed rate of half a cent per share. For me I add and my ending cost per share is an actual negative number for trades I do over 300K per month. For the first 300K I average around 14 cents per hundred shares (I generally trade small size per ticket or it would even be less). On the rare times that I do take liquidity it is to the best of my knowledge always MORE than what it would cost with the fixed pricing Hope that helps and if the IB guy says different than I would go with what he says.