Good question! Almost all my trades are in tax-sheltered accounts with no margin. I keep about 2% of my accounts in cash so I can avoid having to sell everything first and then buy later. But sometimes that’s not enough, so I do place my sell orders before my buy orders. Often I’ll place a buy order late in the day once I have enough cash to get it filled.
Yes, Fidelity does a great job sourcing off-exchange liquidity. No matter what algo I use, my fills at Fidelity are consistently better than those at IB. I’ll have to see what they’re like at Goldman . . .
My problem is most of my stocks have a 100% margin requirement, effectively removing the benefit of using margin. I suspect many of you have the same issue although I’ve never seen it discussed. Even though each broker may set their own policy for what they consider risky, I wonder if there is a general rule that can be implemented on the P123 side to filter out such stocks.
Different brokers have different margin requirements. IB, for example, has 100% margin requirement on almost all stocks with a market cap below $400M, almost all Canadian stocks, and almost all European stocks. Fidelity, on the other hand, has 100% margin requirement only on truly tiny stocks. I’ve looked now at a lot of different brokers, including Pershing, Wedbush, and Goldman, and none of them have margin requirements anywhere near as high as IB’s.
Some good news on this front: IBKR now supports execution algos for Polish stocks. I went to close out one of my Warsaw-listed positions today and saw the typical ex-US set of execution algos available from IBKR Mobile. I sold the position using the Adaptive algo with no problems.