Hey Everybody - This is Danny Rosenthal - CEO of OptionsHouse. I saw this post on the forum and thought I would chime in. Our flat rate pricing is $9.95 per trade with no per contract fees. For spread trades the $9.95 is per leg. Exchanges do not charge exchange fees for most retail trades. There are OCC fees and fees for some index trades. So while we can lose money on a particular trade, we generally do well in aggregate. If we find that a customer is ONLY doing trades that cost us more than the commission that we collect we are likely to start passing exchange and OCC fees through to that customer. This has only happened once. Our Money Market rates are competitive - call customer service for the most recent rates. Besides our competitive pricing we have a nice trading interface that was recently featured in ID Magazine (http://digital.id-mag.com/idmagazine/id200706/?pg=90) and in the BusinessWeek innovation section (http://www.businessweek.com/innovat...an=innovation_innovation+++design_top+stories). You can sign up and check out our site without funding via our newly released virtual trading platform. Thanks. Hope this helps. Cheers, Danny
Danny, Can you talk about routing at Options House? Specifically, I am interested in whether and how clients can self direct orders, and also how the smart routing algorithm chooses destinations. Somewhere it was posted that traders need to telephone in self-directed orders to Options House - is that the case? Also, can you approximate at what size average order you would need to start passing on the fees you mentioned? Thanks.
"Exchanges do not charge exchange fees for most retail trades. There are OCC fees and fees for some index trades." Danny does the IWM charge you guys? ps: Glad to see you here !
Back Again - Thanks for the questions and interest. Whistlingleaf - I believe that the ISE charges customers 0.15 for IWM options. Not 100% sure about the CBOE. You can find out for sure if you call the CBOE hotline or you can call our customer service desk and they can get specifics for you. One - We do not currently let retail clients self direct orders. I posted on this topic in another thread at http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showt...e=6&highlight=optionshouse smart&pagenumber=2 The smart router algorithms are reasonably complicated, but the general goal is to make sure that customers get best execution. This can get complicated in the corner cases, but we measure and monitor our results including giving customers access to a trade-by-trade execution reports. We do not have hard rules about where we would start passing fees onto a customer and we have only ever done this with one customer to date. If this is a determining factor for you and you suspect that you may be subject to the pass through, please call customer service and discuss the specifics with Peter Lawler who runs our institutional business. Cheers, Danny