you can email the CEO directly. I did and he actually replied my email relatively fast. here is the email: CEO@optionshouse.com Although, I don't think he'll do anything short term. For now, their price is still one of the cheapest. The only brokerage (that I know of) that beats them in term of commission is Eoption, but I heard bad things about them too. I had TradeKing before and relatively speaking, TK has better fill than OH, but that's just me.
My email said that the rates go up on the 15th, but I got info that the rate changes the day after I select which one I want. So I will change it on the 14th. And it seems like you can go back and forth from the high volume to low volume pricing, taking effect the next day. It would be nice if the pricing didn't have this two layer choice, but it doesn't effect me that much at all. It was nice not having to worry about commissions. At some point I may consider checking out IB. Nice while it lasted. I was paying .75 per option before. It is hard to break into this business and this pricing got them started, got them people to open accounts. It got me to open an account with a firm which to me was an unknown. I am sure this change was always a possibility. They may lose accounts but I suspect many of the accounts they lose do not have the order flow that pays them the most. When I worked in the financial industry we had an automated equity trading platform with a firm that decided they did not want our business because they did not like that we were often doing the side of a trade that they wanted to do. OH did have a very barebones operation. Though today they just expanded their trading hours.
Yah. Like I said, I'm quite unhappy with the commission change and will have to use my EOption account more often now for most trades(their platform is ugly), but for OH this change is great. They just undercut Zecco/TK/Sogo etc. on cost for any size option trade or stock trade and their platform is 100x better than TK/Zecco's (no experience with Sogo/ETrade/etc etc) ..In my opinion, all they need now is people from those other brokers to just try their system and they'll be hooked based on price and the platform. .. ToS/IB etc customers are a different story of course, but you can't have it all.
Not for people that do 1 and 5 (up to maybe 10 or so) contract orders, which I would assume is a good amount of people and probably worth a lot more than the people that have use for a flat rate commission for large orders..
I would stay away from any discount brokerage house. Saving a few bucks on commissions pales in comparison to the money you could potentially lose on a faulty system with poor execution. I recommend Think or Swim and OptionsXpress.
So far I had hybrid approach. OH for 20+ contracts (or 10 spread) lot and IB for anything that I scale-in or scale-out with smaller lots. So now I'll move completely to IB and trade the pricy equivalents. Say if I want to buy 20 CALLs on SRS; With IB I'll buy 4 PUTs on IYR
I went to Interactive Brokers website to see what IB's option commission were. Maybe I am missing something but it seems like unless I do >100000 contracts, the commissions are better/lower with OH. Though I am not versed on what I would save in perhaps better fills. http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/accounts/fees/commission.php?ic=1&p=opt&ib_entity=llc Which seems to leave eoption as the lower cost option. By the way, in my opinion disappointing but not "junk." Interesting when I called before opening my account I said to the guy this seems too good to be true.