Am I missing something? They make you PAY for live quotes for simple equities on the NYSE? $127.25 a month? I mean, even basic sites like scottrade give you live quotes for just having an account. Hell, even yahoo and google finance have live quotes (maybe delayed a minute or so max). Am I missing something?
You have to pay for either professional or non professional data fees or you get a delayed feed. Yahoo and Google finance pay for the data feeds in bulk and get it back from advertising. Most brokers charge you for something otherwise they have to pay it.
do your home work before you start SOL..and first step is to figure out your status. judging by amount you mentioned-looks like you trade via some sort of entity. all of them are treated as pro. read disclosure regarding data from IB website. the broker is not 'charging' anything..they just passing those charges from exchanges to you. that's it. if you don't like-go to scottrade and pay 7$ per trade. yahoo shows real time only data from BATS. it's just one ECN(out of 80+ market centers). for example ARCA will charge you separately $10 per month per account regardless. retail accounts pays $10 per month for BASIC data and nothing,if they generate $30 in commissions. http://individuals.interactivebrokers.com/en/p.php?f=marketData read notes at bottom of the page.
some IB users have both retail and pro accounts. they use data from retail and trade thru pro without any data subscriptions. you can have real time streaming quotes from yahoo for like 13$ a month. good quality, i use them in the past
Did I miss something big? I thought my basic quotes were real time for equities at IB. They seem to be on the same page as Schwab which are supposed to be live. I meet the minimums at IB for commissions so end up not paying the basic fee, but I also thought those were live quotes I was getting. Kick me in the rear for not catching.
IB is for active traders. Unless your an active trader and use Margin etc.. you really would get more bang for the buck with someone like TD or Scottrade.
something like TD can be more bang for a buck,if you trade huge size once in while,using their fixed commissions. other than that..i doubt it. plus -IB is only one in industry with direct access to corp bond market with comish that no one can beat. flat,plain, no bs markups and you can trade whatever you see,not just someone's internal inventory.
Yeah but I need their friends and family account set up. Trading for some family. So far the experience has not been easy. I'm terrified what will happen when I finally put in a trade.