Well all you need to do is fill in quantity for your order and hit Buy/Short/Cover/Sell for whatever the trade is. I don't think it can be much easier. Fill in a quantity and hit a button. You need to read before you post!! Where did I say IB's commissions weren't better? I said they're cheaper on the first 500 shares and no SEC fees. As far as the interest MB pays on the first $10,000, At current rates that's $320/year which would cover almost $10,400,000 of SEC fees (@ 0.0000307). So on the one hand you say retail investors trades small lots. Let me tell you, almost $10 1/2 MILLION of trades would be a lot for small retail traders which the interest MB pays would cover. Please post IB's rate on $35K since you say it's higher and offsets them paying zero interest on balances up to $10,000. Just curious to see if there is any difference that makes up some of the interest MB pays on the first $10,000.
If you allow Penson (MBT's clearing firm) to sweep your unused cash then you will get the prevailing money market rates. They are using Scudder (as you can see from the Scudder hyperlink on the Penson.com homepage) I'm not sure if you get a choice of funds, I seem to recall you do but its been a while since I set mine up. For my December Penson statement this is what it says: 12/30/05 MoneyFund 3.224% 12/01-12/30 If you go to Scudder's site you can see the current yields on their 3 MM funds: http://www.scudder.com/t/index.jhtml?content=/t/fund/money_fund/scudder/current_yields/index.jhtml I don't know if "Scudder Money Market Fund" (KMMXX) is the same fund that I have selected but I suspect it is. The current 7-day yield is 3.9%. Again I'm not at all sure that this is the same fund that Penson uses for its cash sweeping. I would imagine that if you do not opt to have your cash swept into the MM fund then you would get the MBT published rate of 1%. The MM fund is not FDIC insured so that is a consideration. I would also like to add that when I had a problem with a trade that reported late (over one hour) due to a technical glitch on MBT's side I sent Steve (one of the two-cofounders of MBT who posts here as MBT-Steve) an email describing the situation. Steve personally called me on my cell phone within a half-hour, we discussed the situation and we came to a mutually acceptable resolution. Let me say that I fully assumed before I received the call that I was going to get no resolution and was basically going to have to eat the loss that this bad trade caused and chalk it up to the joys of trading online. I am not by any means a big trader at MBT (5 digit acct) and therefore I did not have any leverage to threaten them with to do what I considered "the right thing". Nevertheless Steve was completely reasonable and like I said we reached an agreement that made me whole. That kind of customer service is something that MBT can and does deliver. Obviously everyone has their own priorities on commissions, trading hours, products available and customer service so no one place is going to be right for everyone but the general theme I get from dealing with several people at MBT is that they are willing to try harder to satisfy their customers. I have no experience with IB but I know I have read many reports here that IB is arrogant and does not exude that feeling.
A similar discussion last week covered this. My November statement was 3% and December is 3.2% Scudder MM Portfolio). I posted the November paid interest in an attachment to a post under "Low Commission Broker" in Retail Firms. The rate went up in December.
You are in different class than me. I trade usually in 100 shares lot and not more than 10 trades per week.
How about Genesis Laser by itself? Or Medved + Genesis Laser? Teddy libertad But the fact is that IB is a large well financed firm that has an excellent international business model....and when combined with Medved ...is the most competitve product in the US... GENESIS provides 10:1 leverage ...better commission rates....and extremely fast quotes.....and they know their type of business...
Laser has charting ability...but Medved's charts are awesome... When the Genesis data feed is made available to Medved...this combination will be unbeatable for US stocks...in price..speed...leverage...and charting capabilities....
Thank you very much guys for your input which helped me a lot! I will open an account with MB Trading now. The main reason is that I attach great importance to quality (regarding customer service and order execution) rather than quantity and I'm willing to pay a little extra in return. Maybe this is due to my german origin . With this I don't want to say that IB, Genesis or all the other brokers are not as good as MB but I have the feeling that MB suits me the best. Greetings from Germany and thank you once again!
Yeah...if I did not trade a lot...I would appreciate a personable small broker who is entrepreneurial that I liked...a million times over before I would sign up with Fidelity or Schwab ...for the masses type of company.... One thing that stands out nowadays is that with commissions coming down next to nothing versus the late 90'S...it takes a lot of volume to produce decent revenues... Let's say if you have a 1000 customers and the average trades per account per day is 4 with an average of 300 shares...and you do not self clear...this is not a lot of money to run a brokerage firm... But to be sure there should be a viable niche for a few personable brokerages that cater to the relatively low volume...and the high volume vaqueros.... Being super big is bullshit when one has problems.... Excellent niche players win big in my book....