I have one question:you choose to have two accounts (one for trading and the other one for LT investing)only for a matter of 'comfort'?Or is there another particular reason?
they all sell order flow. if you want to pay commission go ahead. that platform sucks for trading but long term its fine.
If you combine active trading and (passive) long term investing into one account you have to keep tabs yourself about which trade is for what purpose, and which open position is for what purpose. If you keep separate accounts you can more easily separate the two objectives (trading versus investing). You receive two separate monthly overviews from IB, with a separate profit&loss and separate overview of all trades placed (incl. related transaction fees). So yes, I do it for comfort as it is more clearly visible what is happening with each of them.
And the cost of having two differents accounts on IB is the same as having only one right?(I mean,they dont charge you just for having an account,but they charge you by the trades/fees/commisions).Its not like if i open two differents accounts i would be paying more than if i just open only one account right?
Exactly. They charge per user account (login&password), not by trading account (Uxxx account number). If you have multiple trading accounts you will be able to select the trading account to which the fees (e.g. market data subscriptions) are to be charged to.
most 'long term investors' fail not because their broker charge them $10/month.... they fail because when the market is going up they all think they can be there for the 'long haul', but the moment the market drops, they can't sleep, can't take the pain, have to sell at the bottom so the pain can go away. ask yourself, how much draw down can you handle without losing sleep? if it's $10k, then that means you can only buy $20k of stocks, even if you have $500k in hand.... you have to put the other $480k in bank CD... that's what I meant.