I am a swing trader. I trade small lots of 75-100 shares, executing 10-12 trades or 20-22 round trips per month. I currently am working off the 25 free trades at Ameritrade and feel I could reduce my commissions considerably with IB, once the $10.99 ea way kicks in that is. Features I believe to be available with IB, but would appreciate confirmation include simultaneous order entry and mobile access via a web enabled cell phone. Ideally, I could enter my stop/limit order to buy or sell short and simultaneously enter the exit price AND the stop loss before ever leaving my home for my day job. I could then wait until the end of the day to see which way my trade went. In other words, I can't be watching the market and adjusting my targets during the day. Is this scenario available from IB? Entering my limit price(entry), Exit price(profit), and Stop price (loss) all at the same time. The prices would be considerably far apart,ie; a couple of dollars at least. What about commission minimums? Trading small lots as indicated, even with fairly high turns still results in low monthly commissions and I read where if you don't generate at least $30/mo., they charge other fees? What would the fees be? The web enabled cell phone is for the rare occasion when I can watch the market and if I decide to make a trade during regular market hours, which will be very rare. My account size is 10K and I'm looking to make a few extra hundred a month. Incidentally, Im using a monthly newsletter (I don't work there) called Synergy Trader, Tom Biorrovic, any comments on this would be useful as well. All feedback is appreciated.
Have found that most places will negotiate price per trade. I was all set upfor IB but could never get a phone call through. My wire transfer request got a matching price from my current broker.
catcando said: I am a swing trader. I trade small lots of 75-100 shares, For this type of trading, IB may be the cheapest around, at 0.01/share with a minimum commish of $1. For a 100-share trade, that's 91% cheaper than the AMTD commish you mentioned. There are some issues with trading odd-lots of NYSE stocks. You might mention which stocks you trade. Features I believe to be available with IB, but would appreciate confirmation include simultaneous order entry and mobile access via a web enabled cell phone. I wasn't all that impressed with how the mobile trader looked on a phone, but this is at least partially a result of the very limited screen space and capabilities of WML. It might be OK for swing-trades. There's a relatively limited number of phones that have the necessary configurability of gateway and connection type to work with IB. Check the IB discussion board (http://www.interactivebrokers.com/cgi-bin/discus/discus.pl). There are new stop/trailing stop/combo mechanisms now. You might check out the demo as well as the discussion board for more details. What about commission minimums? Trading small lots as indicated, even with fairly high turns still results in low monthly commissions and I read where if you don't generate at least $30/mo., they charge other fees? What would the fees be? Just the exchange fees, which, for US stocks (NYSE/AMEX/NASDAQ) and options, are just $10. Not significant when you consider the commission savings.