Forgive me if I get this wrong, but can’t I trade this 5,000 share trade with TD Ameritrade for maximum $9.95 - or whatever else you can negotiate?
Forgive me if I get this wrong, but can’t I trade this 5,000 share trade with TD Ameritrade for maximum $9.95 - or whatever else you can negotiate?
To be honest, I think this is chasing pennies to and forgetting about dollars.
Slippage is a much larger cost, and I would strongly recommend anyone trading in this type of volume not to do it in one trade (unless you are trading GE etc.).
While in theory you could bundle everything into one massive trade to save on commissions, in reality few small/mid cap stocks have an NMS of 50 round lots, and getting executed just a penny better is worth $50 - I really recommend you don’t try and whack the market with a large order, accumulate gently and you will find you get better fills.
I take some of that back: Orders executed in multiple lots on the same trading day will be charged a single commission.
That is impressive.
Next question though, are they a direct access broker?
I still maintain that slippage is the most important consideration.
I think that is referring to partial fills of a single submitted order. I would expect to only pay brokerage for one transaction in such a case.
Gradually accumulating or selling throughout the day would mean submitting multiple orders throughout the day, which should incur brokerage cost each time.
What do you guys think about ThinkorSwim? It is not quite as cheap as IB. Its website seems to be easy to use and the technical support has been good (so far).
But that’s what’s great about IB’s comm schedule. In most cases, it’s a straight 0.5 cents/share, so it costs nothing to split your order into pieces.
Another plus: You can enter a list of orders that become active at speciried times throughout the day.
Once I started using their TWS instead of WebTrader, I got over most of my complaints about IB.