I trade around 500 contracts a month and I'm very happy with TD Ameritrade. However, I also really don't mind saving almost $4000 in commission by switching temporarily to TS. They are giving away free trades till the end of the year for new customers. Has anyone tried TS for options and can give some feedback? Thanks.
I used TD on occasions during last couple years for test trading options and evaluating whether it’s worth switching to, and I know a few others who use it daily. Some people like it more than IB, but I find their GUI/usability less usable, and lacking some features I liked with IB, or possibly I didn’t find them. Though I still use TD for testing historical options trading, which is a feature that IB doesn’t have. Margin on some options and combos was sometimes better at TD and other times at IB, so you may want to compare them, depending on what you trade. In some cases IB seems to calculate the margin based on overall portfolio exposure vs individual options, and even then they apply additional formulas based on market moving by specific % levels, while TD seems to do more basic calculations. But I know someone who sells so many OTM puts and calls on SPX at TD that it seems impossible margin-wise unless TD also utilizes some type of portfolio margin to evaluate overall risk. I was also able to use less margin at TD on some ratio spreads. Generally I’d expect very different margin behavior and you’ll just have to experience it and figure things out as you go. One thing I didn’t like at TD and that made it almost impossible for me to switch to them, is that they didn’t allow me to place more orders than my margin allows, so for example I could place only 5 orders under assumption that they all will go through, but at IB I’m able to park 500 orders and only those that go through will utilize the margin while others I can cancel later, or they will self-cancel when I’m really low on margin. Some things might’ve changed at TD since last year when I last used it, or I may not know all the tricks and caveats, so this is just a basic assessment. From GUI & usability point of view it took me a while to figure out how to create orders for option combos with TD’s software ToS. I think I need to hold Shift or Ctrl when selecting multiple options, to set them as a combo. Later I saw someone complaining that IB doesn’t have such “feature” though everyone uses their combo builder without issues.
If you make 2500 contracts, $4K commission should be nothing compared to your profit I guess.... Why do you bother yourself to learn new trading platform which can lead to unwanted mistakes and risk.....?
Hey, 2500 contracts in 5 months. $4K is far from nothing for me. I work hard for my profit and even $1K is significant. I don't know if my strategy stops working tomorrow and profit ceases.
About a year ago, TDA was receptive to negotiations on commissions. I do not know if they still are, but you seem to be between 1.50 to 2.00 per contract, which seems fairly steep. You may want to request $1.00 max (which I think may be very reasonable based on your trading). -- TDA is still eating the exchange fees on index options, which is a nice plus, if you trade index options.
Yes, I pay $1.5 per contract. Thanks, I will talk to them soon. However, I wonder why no one seems to know about TradeStation when it comes to options, they seem to be the only one besides TDA to have serious option analyze capability (black scholes p&l strike distribution).