If you are going to trade and make some money, you'll need to pay attention to the details. For example, there is a HUGE difference between a firm charging .5% PER trade and a firm charging a MAXIMUM of .5% per trade. If you took the time to read carefully, you would note that for Canadian stocks, IB charges 1 penny per trade with a $1 minimum and a .5% MAXIMUM. I'll even make it more simple with an example. Buying 200 shares of stock XYZ trading at $25 will cost you a whopping $2 in commission, not the $50 you state above. For stocks trading less than 1 penny which you seem to prefer, IB would not be the broker for you. However, when making a blanket statement on fees, get your facts straight please.
I use both IB and Questrade for Canadian stocks, Admittedly IB is a bit expensive for large numbers of low priced stocks. The fixed prices at Questrade seem fair, and I haven't experienced delays getting fills except for when shorting stocks (with stocks unavailable).
You think Canada is bad? You ought to try elsewhere, even the likes of UK, Australia and Europe is a closed shop/market carve up. It'd have you singing the praises of Canadian brokers. If it weren't for US/Canadian brokers alot of trading would be impossible
something new I'd like to do 75,000 shares at $5 CAD IB: 1 cent per trade, 2 cent round trip $750 per trade, $1500 round trip Questrade: $10 per trade, $20 round trip ECN fees on top of that? Questrade data feeds on their Axis platform. Watch out for bad bids/asks that hang around and keep the Price Ladder fixed in that area even after Last Price has gone above or below the displayed range of the price ladder, and you can no longer click on the price of your choice for orders, the whole point of my getting that platform. You can't flush that buffer, because it's on their servers. They login to the platform, don't see the same old bids/asks, but often their feed would shortly develop them. Let them login to my account on the platform (yes, I know risky, but desperate and changed password immediately) and they see exactly the same old bids/asks locking the price ladder as I see on my machine. Never a solution.
Questrade: $262.50 ECN + $9.95 commission for $272.45 per trade, $544.90 round trip. IB's penny per share per trade sounds great, but it's nearly 3x as expensive. They've got to be kidding?
And you'll get all 75K in one fill? Do the same math on 100, 500 and 1000 shares. We can't be all things to all people. If penny stocks are your thing we may not be the best firm for you. We do focus on providing the best fills at a great price for our targeted clientele. While it would be fantastic, I assure you that most firms and traders are not trading in blocks of 75000 shares at a time.
Good grief. Why would you even expect anyone to be interested in supporting your low-rolling gambling habit? You are essentially asking for a handout.
Surprisingly yes, and in two contracts, both trading between $5 and $10 (no, not their range - I wish - one is near one end, one the other). The trades wouldn't suggest it has such good liquidity, but after the first five minutes the book is full for every tick for several ticks up & down, with a spread of 1 and on rare occasions 2. Would fill in one tick with occasionally needing to take from the next. There's a lot of sideways within a day, along with regular movement. Testing shows a day would typically involve an entry and 30 to 40 reversals required to ensure I'm in place for the quick higher ranging price jumps. In fees, that adds up. A lot. The past two days are a little weird with volume down so far compared to recent weeks, but it looks awfully good. Did a quick volume test the other day to confirm that the book wouldn't jump away. One click in, pause one click out: one cent difference on the spread. Only one cent lost to the test, but at the final fee it was an expensive test none the less. I used to be able to easily get 10 lots of rimm when it was between $120 and $150, and usually could bump that up to 16. In slower periods, usually afternoons, I'd have to go down to 5 lots. Now, I can't find a safe way to enter aapl without going down to 2 lots, and it's still iffy. And it's down to 5 lots of rimm and I have to wait well past open for the book to fill up before trading, even with it's current low price. If I can't get my money into the market, it's not doing anything for me. So, given the available book on those two contracts, they look mighty viable. NASDAQ is 1 cent round trip. TSX is two. Questrade on TSX is 1/3 the fees. I went to IB for large cap. Use SMART. In 400 trades for my testing, there have been six where I've felt, well, used, due to very poor fills that didn't make sense given the book. The bulk of the trades are appropriate to the book, and near half the time somewhat better than expected. Depending on the day, around 1/8 of the trades are filled with me saying "how did I ever get that good a price". So I'd gladly put up with the six bad fills - that's an awfully good ratio. But, to run this under $10 stuff at a volume that's worth my time... I may end up running low volume on auto through IB API, and do larger volumes at Questrade due to the fee difference. As trades will almost always be taking liquidity, not sure if it's even worth it to do the math on the alternate pricing structure. I should see if anyone's developed a spread sheet for that.
Attached is the fee comparison from 100 through 1,000 shares, and amounts above. I hope I did the math right. For example, IB on TSX is $1 for 100 shares, QT is $5.30. At 1000 shares, IB is $10, QT is $13.45. At 10,000 shares, IB is $100, QT is $44.95; more than double. At 50,000 shares, IB is $500, QT is $184.95; nearly triple. The middle of the $5 to $10 range I want to trade is $7.50. My most recent test came out as an entry order, 37 reversal double orders, an exit order. So if a position/entry is 50,000 shares, that would be orders totaling: 50,000 + (37 * 50,000 *2) + 50,000 = 3.8 million shares. I'd like to get the reversals down to the 20 a day range, so that would be 2 million shares a day? It's always buying the Best Ask and selling the Best Bid. So def, could you to the math (or point me to a tool to do so) for IB's Cost+ pricing for: Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) Stock price of $7.50 CAD 3.8 million shares a day, for 20 days a month = 76 million shares a month and for 40 million shares a month Thanks,
What broker did you use to do that and why did you stop using that broker to trade pinksheet stocks ? I mean, you've stated specifically that pinksheet trading is very important to you or the most important thing to trade for you... Why not just continue using the same broker you've been using to make "serious gains in a very short amounts of time" while trading pinksheet stocks. Mark