thinkorswim acquired by ameritrade.

Discussion in 'Retail Brokers' started by gaj, Jan 8, 2009.

  1. tman

    tman

    Where will you go?? What products do you trade??
     
    #151     Jan 10, 2009
  2. Tom is transferring 4,653,400 shares to TD. He did quite well yes.

    The Reporting Person is deemed to beneficially own 4,653,400 shares of Common Stock (“Subject Shares”), which includes 4,000 shares of Common Stock owned individually, 4,411,760 shares held by the Tom Sosnoff Living Trust u/a/d 12/7/2006, and options to purchase 237,640 additional shares of Common Stock that are exercisable within the 60 days of January 8, 2009. Such shares of Common Stock and options represent 7.0% of the Company’s outstanding capital stock as of January 8, 2009.
     
    #152     Jan 11, 2009
  3. Anyone out there check out AMTD's rules on trading within an IRA? Will TOS customers still be allowed to trade our IRA as we currently do and will margin be calculated the same way? OR will AMTD change the rules and make them more restrictive? TIA

    I did check out the fee's and yuck:mad:
     
    #153     Jan 22, 2009
  4. piezoe

    piezoe

    This is precisely the mistake E-Trade made in acquiring BrownCo from J P Morgan. At the time of this acquisition Brown ave account size was approximately 125K, among the largest in the industry, while E-Trade's accounts were much smaller. Rates were low at Brown and service was excellent, but the free software offered by Brown was not suitable for intraday trading. The customer fit between Brown and E-Trade at the time of the acquisition was very bad, and as a result many Brown customers walked out the door. I was one of them and I walked over to TOS. I predicted that E-Trade paid far to much for Brown considering that they could lose most of the Brown accounts, which was really the asset E-Trade was after. I was right and this turned out to be a very bad deal for E-Trade's bottom line. The point here is that when you are buying a business whose number one asset is their customer base, you had better make sure those customers are not going to walk.

    It's a little different in the case of TOS, because they have a trading platform worth something, but nevertheless it's not worth 600 million. If the TOS customers walk, Ameritrade will be in trouble on this deal, Just as happened to E-Trade. Incidentally, I thought at the time of the E-Trade deal with Brown that a far better fit would have been E-Trade with Ameritrade. I still think I was right about that.

    I'll likely be one of the TOS customers who walks. Possibly i'll keep a minimum account at TOS to have access to their Options software. I stopped trading futures with TOS intraday already because their data feed and charting are not sufficiently fast and synchronized and their DOM trading feature is still in beta and lacks important functionality. OEC seems much better for futures, but there has been some recent complaints about the data feed there too.

    This deal with Ameritrade is horrible news. I hate having to move accounts around. I'ts a big pain in the ass.
     
    #154     Jan 22, 2009
  5. What fee did you mean? The commission won't change. I have both AMTD and TOS.
     
    #155     Jan 22, 2009
  6. This deal is AWESOME as far as I am concerned. I started out with TD Ameritrade (still have an account with them but I am more into forex now). But because they only offer Stocks/Options/Bonds/IRAs/ETFs I had to open an account with OptionsXpress for futures/index options and FXCM for forex.

    If TD Ameritrade offers reasonable forex, futures and other stuff I could dump my existing accounts with other places and come back to the broker I have a special attachment to.
     
    #156     Jan 22, 2009
  7. AMTD has a ticket charge in addition to the per contract chg on options. yip do you trade an IRA account at AMTD?
     
    #157     Jan 23, 2009
  8. Call them, and they will waive the ticket charge. The problem will AMTD is that their margin calculation is higher than TOS. For example they require you margin for both sides of an iron condor. I have IRA with AMTD, but i never trade options with AMTD IRA account.
     
    #158     Jan 23, 2009
  9. tman

    tman

    Do they charge margin on both sides of an iron if the account has portfolio margin???
     
    #159     Jan 23, 2009
  10. Thanks Yip, I will wait to see what is going to happen. I do hope that with/if the heads of TOS go to AMTD then perhaps there will be changes made favorable to us ...if not I will move on.:(
     
    #160     Jan 24, 2009