Ok I was happily trading the Russell 2000 for free with my broker as an active trader. On Apr 1, they now charge 100$/month for IPE/ICE exchange (Russell 2k) whatever products. It is 1$/month to trade ES/NQ with my broker. What the hell...
ICE needs to make back all the money they spent in buying those products like Emini TF futures from the CME. The actual fee that ICE is charging for the Emini TF futures is $110. Thus, if you're broker is only passing to you $100 of that fee...the broker is giving you a $10 discount off the total. The fees activated on April 1st. It will be interesting to see if liquidity, volume drops in products like Emini TF futures and the Brent Oil BRN futures. The result is that many retail traders will just stop trading these products and switch to other products like...Emini NQ futures, Emini ES futures, Emini YM futures, Emini EMD futures and so on. Ironically, ICE purchased the Emini TF futures was purchased from the CME back in September 2008...a purchase that basically destroyed the volatility of the Russell Emini when it was known on the CME as Emin ER2 along with killing 1/2 the volume. Now with the new fees...traders will be driven to other products on the CME that could possibly force ICE to sell it back to the CME due to the lack of interest. In fact, I remember reading articles about the purchase in financial magazines that essentially predicted by business experts that this would occur...fee increases that will eventually drive away small traders to other trading products and then the reselling of the Russell Emini to another exchange. This isn't a bad thing for the ICE and it may be intentional considering the bulk of ICE income is from professional institutional traders, hedge funds and other financial institutions that prefer to use the Russell Emini for spread trading and hedging. Thus, ICE may have lost interest in dealing with "small traders" and decided to make as much money as they can off the "small trader" along with ICE hoping they can sell the Russell Emini TF futures to someone else like the CME. I remember the highest price prediction (fees per month) was $250 for the Emini TF before 2020. The trading business is slowly becoming something in which they only want to do business with "active traders" and with traders that can easily absorb these increasing exchange fees. That started when many brokers several years back adopted "inactivity fees".
Aside from TDA, I've always payed for ICE data. What brokers are people using that they didn't have to pay this? I highly doubt IPE products will be affected as well - most of that volume is pro.
Yea, I was kinda wondering if there are other brokers which don't charge you... TF is perfect for day trading. I didn't think of switching to IWM, I've always done futures. NQ is close enough for what I need, and I've though about going ES. My strategy is becoming longer term-ish, so ES will be fine. I now base my trades off the daily bars. It's so much less stressful and easier. I guess they can just fiddle with the fees whenever they want, but I just don't get one exchange charging so much more than the other, when they essentially do the same thing. And it was 107$ with some additional charge thru my broker. ~110.
Already a done deal isn't it: http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/equity-index/us-index/ftse-russell-index-futures.html Scroll down to Products Available Soon then look on RHS - says back with CME from Q3 2017. Clearly ICE are just trying to milk it before it goes anyway.
C'mon. This isn't an issue of milking TF, look around: there are tons of products that trade on ICEUS that aren't even related to the Russell whatsoever and they're not going to CME.
See what the fk... so exchanges swap contracts every few months...? At least my life will be back to normal in 2017... bastards. I need Russell to give me back some money yet. Besides, I can't even get all of those products listed on CME even though I'm now paying for them. Guess my broker just gets to pick?
I just checked the ICE website and their data fees are the same for 2017, still $110/month and no discount for non-pro users: https://www.theice.com/publicdocs/data/Market_Data_Subscriber_Fees.pdf $110/month may be cost prohibitive for smaller retail traders. Is there some reason this exchange does not want retail traders who qualify as non-pro? I would think they would be happy for the additional liquidity.