As has been discussed above, IB will match or beat many prop firm's rates, depending on your trading style and volume. The main reason people trade prop is for the leverage. Intraday leverage is free, usually at least 10x your capital and often multiples of that. Heavily leveraged overnight positions will be allowed at some firms, but not that many, and usually you'll have to be hedged in some manner. Overnight leverage that's modestly more than reg-T limits, maybe 2-5x, is more common. Overnight leverage (or any positions at all) at a no money up firm is probably impossible.
I have two accounts at the prop shop I trade at (per-share and per-execution) The per-execution account is used when I'm trading larger size and ends up coming out to $.002 per share (ECN, SEC, NASD fees included) at the end of the day. That's the only cost structure that makes sense for scalping or trading larger size orders. If you're paying $.002, $.003, or $.004 per share (plus ECN, SEC, and NASD) and scalping, you will have a tough time covering your costs. Or the the very least, you will not be making as much as you could be. I only use the per-share acct when I'm trading 100-1000 share orders.
What? Iam paying $4.75 all in. I tade nasdaq stocks like wynn,isrg,bidu,rimm. I also pay sec fee plus nasdaq fee. Thats $4.75 per 1000 shares. If i trade 100,000 shares of bidu thats 50,000 shares on the sell side which is 5 million in sec fee's in the end it's $150.00. Now ib has a .005 all in which equals $5.00 per 1000 shares no other hidden fee's? My volume is anywhere from 2million to 6 million shares a month. In a busy market i buy sell allday long. Last 5 months been dead volume 2-3 million shares a month. If what your saying is true pm with information at the $5.00 all in per 1000 shares and outside of myself i also know other volume traders who are bigger(volume wise) than myself. I will provide runs anything you need to show my volume. I feel stupid if this is true i have been getting ripped off. Sec fee's have been killing all of us. Feel free to pm me with any information you have.
last month in sec fees alone i paid around $4,000. $3941.74 to be exact. I tade 40,000(for the month) shares total in goog which i never trade that stock. Trading has been tough but if my deal is off by that much iam such a fool. I feel sick right now
sqeeze you're a sucker as to beleive everything yoiu read. if you're paying .00475 all in then i assume you're taking liquidity 90% of more of the time?if you are then .00475 all in is agood rate. if you trade goog all day long then ib is the only place you can avoid the sec fee's. that cats full of crap saying he pays $1 all in including sec fee's. if thats the case his boss is taking 50-60% of his profits or he'd lose his but. assume you hit bids all day long at .00475 that means net your boss is only making the overide from what his rate is to .00175. if you take and add liquidity 50-50 they're you're better off withe a ,002 ish rate and you take the ecn risk? i'm curious why you took an all in rate? i assume you're prop and get good leverage so thats also worth something
My per-execution account only makes sense for large size orders, which eliminates GOOG and other pricey stocks (anything over $40-$50). I'm not trading 5-10K share orders of these expensive stocks. There's no way I'm holding $1 mil + of equity, it's just not my trading style. For scalping, which normally involves inexpensive stocks, the SEC fee is minimal. The total cost equates to about .002 per share when all the execution and SEC, ECN/SDOT, and NASD fees are totalled. I'd say I'm about 40-50% passive, thus partially offsetting my ECN charges. People are assuming that active orders are going through ECNs (at $3 per thousand charge), but SDOT charges are much cheaper (only $.50 per thousand) There seems to be a lot of confusion about the actual costs. Please let me know if you need further clarification.