I trade 1.5 million shares per month. Commission rates have become a very important issue for me. I saved $54,000 this year in commisions when my company switched to another clearing firm with a .03cent/share difference in commissions rates. I have a solid trading strategy and have been profitable 35 out of the last 36 months of trading. Boosting my profits by $54k is not chump change. I agree that other factors are more important than commissions but if you think they are not important you are missing something. TK
klein, I completey agree with what you are saying. Little costs can mean a lot in any business, especially high volume ones. I bet that doubling of the SEC fee doesn't add up to chump change either...ouch! In my recent former life as a controller in high volume wafer fabs, we were fanatical about shaving tiny amounts out of our variable costs, especially in these last three years. The newbies or unitiated to the high tech business often raised an eyebrow at all of this....until we did the math. Then you could see the light come on. Why such fanaticism? Because all of our competitors were doing it. A superior product or better chip design meant little, especially in commodity-type markets with thin profit margins. Competitors were eating our lunch, or rather our market share. Hopefully, the parallels are obvious with commission pricing, especially for high volume players. Your business, your variable costs. If someone is a high volume short-period type scalper, then those costs can be a significant percentage of the total. You've done the math; hopefully, any raised eyebrows see the business implications a bit more clearly.
6 years later, and my honest opinion is that OP is still wrong. Every penny counts. Especially at 10M shares a month.