I don't care who trades where and what they pay. I don't make a lot of cancel/adjustments so the extra fees don't hit me. The commish for closing a 5 ct option is 25 cts and assignment and exercise are free. Tho it doesn't apply to me, their 70 cts per contract scales down to 50/25/10 cts depending on your monthly volume. What's really good for me is that it's a flat fee commish so that enables scaling in and out of positions. Sell two at a time or twenty at once - commish is the same.
For myself I've been using Trademonster for about 2 months. Commissions are 0.50$/contract so thats a big plus (with a minimum of 12.95$ I believe) I like their platform also, I used to do alot of business with optionsxpress but honestly I prefer trademonster. They aren't too hot on the graphics side so it might be a concern for some. On the downside I think I have lost a little bit on the execution quality but maybe its just my imagination or market conditions... anyway it seems more difficult to get fills on spread.
i use IB because of its low fees. to avoid paying cancel fees, all my orders are set to expire at the end of the day. my cancel fees are now 10 times less than when i started
Of course everyone wants their expenses for trading to be as close to zero as possible. If you're trading as a business, not as an investor, I feel you have to be concerned the the entire offering, including price. Which firm offers the best package of price and service that allows you to concentrate on making money and not get distracted with other issues. What "deal" offers both piece of mind and the highest net profit at year end. If one online firm is very inexpensive, but only cares about the market maker that pays them for order flow, that may not be best for you. If another one is very "cheap", but you spend one hour a day on problems or issues with your account or platform, and not trading, what value would you place on personal service? Always looking for the "cheapest" commission does not always get you to what you're looking to achieve, a more profitable business.
I agree that just looking at cost of execution is a limited view when choosing a broker. We are all looking for the best value from our broker. Each of us assigns different weights to the elements that make up our value. For me, competent execution, support and the convenience and competence of the integrated tools outweigh execution costs.
Can you completely eliminate cancellation fees by just entering DTC orders (if you don't modify or cancel the orders during the day)? or does it only reduce the fees by some amount?
I also agree, but the range of retail commissions is very wide and if you are not on the medium or low side of the range the commissions may amount to large sums and then it is just sensible to try to get to a range of commissions which is more reasonable and eats up less of your profits. After you find this range then minor changes in commissions within this range are less substantial and you can also focus on the service quality and other factors, which are absolutely very important.