According to their reply to me, the fee for modifying or canceling an options order is anywhere from .10 to 2.10.
damn, that could add up quickly for active traders. do they rebate back some of those fees if you do enough trading? when would it be 2.10 rather than .10? depend on # of contracts?
This is nightmare. After two modify I finally gave-up and hit MKT. The fee will be .10 if your order is routed to BOX. Someone was suggesting that it goes to BOX if you peg to stock with delta 1. I did not try it yet.
I've no idea. I decided I will likely only use my Etrade account for options trades, since they don't charge for cancellations or changes.
So you'd rather pay $8-10 + .75 per contract to a firm selling your order flow rather than .50 cents a contract to a firm that provide better price improvement in order to save a cost which the exchange charges each firm? (Never mind the 25 cents execution credit per contract which goes against those fees).
My base commission is less because of the length of time I've had accounts with them. Also I didn't know it was .50/contract; I've done some options trades in my demo account and the commission was more than that. Also the commissions were unpredictable, maybe $75 going into the trade and then $105 coming out of it. That, combined with the modification fees, just confused me as to the actual cost. I haven't traded options in a long time, so I imagine it really doesn't matter at this point.
Price improvement my foot. I rarely get better than bid when selling and better than ask when buying with IB. If I don't do market then most likely there will be a modify fee or I'll leave it open and let it expire. Now a days I only trade contracts that trade with 1-3 cents spread - like SPY (or trade long term).
There's a credit against cancel fees for contracts traded. You'd have to check their web site for the formulas.
what kind of price improvement? any different than what the BOX or ISE gives? I'd be really suprised if IB wasn't selling their order flow as well, just about everyone does
http://www.wallstreetletter.com/SubContent.aspx?ArticleID=1946057 Interactive Brokers Scores in TAG Study Transaction Audit Group, a third party analytics provider, awarded high marks to one of the worldâs largest options brokers, Interactive Brokers, for both price improvement and speed of execution. The independent study looked at market orders below 10,000 shares where IB improved executions in the second half of 2007 by 0.35 cents per share better than the industry average. The broker also executed orders at six times the speed of the industry average at 0.9 seconds compared to the average of 5.6 seconds. For options IB was 22 cents better than the industry average for the first half of 2009. http://individuals.interactivebrokers.com/en/p.php?f=smartRouting&ib_entity=llc http://individuals.interactivebrokers.com/images/common/smartrouting_03.gif