To get the active trader rate you have a minimum number of trades per quarter. If you don't make that # your cost is $249. IB under 700 shares is still cheaper. Also to take amonth off at IB costs less. I would think it would be easier to turn features like level2 off and on at IB
It all comes down to what your average trade size is. The average trade size on the NYSE... Has come down from about 3,000 shares 10 years ago... to about 300 shares today. Flat rate brokers count on the fact that your trades will be fragmented... And you will pay a high cents/share... That's their business model. I would guess that 99% of volume traders would only consider per share basis fees... If I had to pay $7/trade my cost would >>>> double. So... it depends... But trading fees are low and not an obstacle to making money. The biggest problem in Canada... Is the ridiculous, incompetent delay in implementing Portfolio Margining. And a very serious problem is the rollout of high Stock Loan rates in 2009... For many Pros Stock Loan fees effectively double their trading costs... My Stock Loan interest at IB has gone from POSITIVE to -$10,000/month in 18 months.
I wouldnt think any of the canadian banks offer an open API for programmers, do they? I would be interested in getting that information. I did look up Disnat and never could find any mention of an API. IB is a good choice for canadians. I have also dealt with Sterling but only through Private Equity firms. I wouldnt know how to get a Sterling account funded without going through a trading firm.
The dream to use RRSP money at IB could be reality, if enough people vote in this feature poll: http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/general/poll/poll.php?sid=4440 With a couple hundred votes, maybe they take a look at it. I know lack of registered accounts is the only thing stopping me from moving all my remaining outside assets to IB.
Buy an investment property in the USA and use that as a base for TradeStation or other automated platform? Probably would need an SSN and pay US taxes on gains, though :-( Damien
I am Canadian, and maintain both a Tradestation and IB account. I have also investigated MultiCharts, which is a Tradestation clone (same GUI, compiles EasyLanguage for faster strategy optimizations), and which also has an API with IB. So you can use your Tradestation strategies in MultiCharts and trade automatically with IB. While I am comfortable with automated trading using Tradestation, I am not comfortable with the stability of the MultiCharts / IB setup, and have only used it a few times under very close supervision. You can use a Tradestation or IB data feeds with Multicharts (or lots of other feeds as well), but Tradestation does not handle the TSX, and IB will only give you 6 months of historical data. As I am a swing trader and like to analyze strategies against as much historical daily data as possible, I get my long term historical data every night from a third party end of data source. There is no issue with being a Canadian and having a Tradestation account, other than the reams of paperwork and the added currency fluctuation risks with having a US$ account. Good Luck!
Do any brokers offer both registered accounts and automated trading yet? Questtrade is an alternative to IB as they offer sterling trader pro (which has a decent API) although not with registered accounts.