Great news for all. We will revise the website soon to reflect the new offer.
We’re still finishing up a few touches to our linked accounts and order management and will be ready to demo it soon. We think the ease of use , the free trading , and how it integrates with P123 Research is a winning combination.
Let us know your thoughts
NOTE: we plan to add other brokers that have free trading and are “API friendly”. So far those are TD Ameritrade and E*Trade. Naturally IBKR is the complicated one; their IBKR Lite accounts will not be accessible via APIs or FIX. Schwab has no API. Fidelity we’re still trying.
NOTE2: with a Tradier account you also get real time bid/ask which is very useful for our automated limit orders as you will see in the demo. It’s not clear at this point if we will be able to provide this feature with other brokers.
Quick question, Marco. I am pretty skeptical in general about all of these commission-free brokers - almost certainly this move to free commissions is not a good development for ordinary account holders, at least at most of these places, because of the brokerages just selling out more of the order flow to the HFTs. Ordinary retail traders might get an up-front commission-free experience, but on the back end they lose a lot more of their money by getting a more inferior order flow that has been compromised by the brokerage-HFT alliance (i.e. if the traders use limit orders, their orders don’t get filled until everyone else at their price point has already been filled, etc.). Has P123 taken steps to investigate Tradier’s HFT connections and to ensure that this commission-free move is not in reality just a deceptive way to hose the retail traders for more money through a more compromised order flow?
BTW, thank you for negotiating the Tradier setup - much appreciated.
Marco can still answer this more specifically. But he, like you, has already expressed his dislike for the order type that can be taken advantage of the most: the market order.
Marco has always talked about algos using limit orders: the order type that can be manipulated the least (if at all).
I only have a vague understanding of how to monetize order flows and the claims that firms like IB or Fidelity make on better execution prices. But I don’t see why HFTs get such a bad rap. They provide instant execution/gratification for those that want it and they make a few bucks. Fair deal. Day traders obviously don’t like them but for investors it’s not consequential. Day traders are probably still better off with IBKR Pro or paying for better executions. For regular investors 0 commissions are more important since they need to deploy relatively small amounts (like monthly contributions) into many stocks, so a $5 commission would be a deal breaker. “Losing” a few pennies is a great tradeoff.
But I do see 0 commissions as a way to open the floodgates for inexperienced individuals that will trade more frequently from an app on the phone. So really I think AMTD, ETRade,etc, will actually benefit long term . Commissions are like charging people to enter Las Vegas. Without them more people will go to the casinos, play more, and lose more (“losing” in trading means lower returns than indexing).
For investors the way to have the cake and eat too is I believe with patience + limit orders. We’re going to show off very soon our tools that make limit orders as simple and fun as market orders. We’ll also run some real world tests by running two identical portfolios on Tradier and IB. Lets see what happens… Will limits + patience + $0 commission beat IB Pro algos ? Stay tuned