Hello (awesome) Bear Bull Traders! As one of your newest lifetime members, I'm in the process of shifting my $50K trading account into the best possible broker for me and would love to obtain advice on what home base should be for my trading account! Reading in this forum posts such as this post, I was saddened to hear that the Interactive Brokers usually very reasonable commission can easily double due to various 'fees' that IB needs to pay its partners to route your order. (I currently have an IB account but not I'm not so sure if it's optimal for me) I understand that IB has fixed and tiered pricing structure, somewhat making the decision more complex... Could you recommend the best between the three given my trading pattern: - I intend to invest mostly in stocks between $5 to $75 with the 'sweet spot' around $35. - I'll be staying away from low float < $10 stocks until I'm consistently profitable with mid-float stocks. - I expect most transactions will be around $20K-$40K so around 1,000 to 3,000 shares per transaction. - To start I'll probably do about 5-10 transaction a day every day but I also want to try my hand at semi-automated scraping so that might go up to 20-40 trades per day. Which of the three do you think is best for me? (SpeedTrader, CenterPoint securities, IB fixed, IB tiered) Thanks for the awesomeness! 🙂 Jean-Pierre

Hi! I've been trading listed stocks with CMEG for a long time now. I recently decided to explore the OTC market strategy. One thing I noticed right off the bat is the expense of commission and ECN fees. With CMEG, the commission rate >1k stocks is .007 and the ECN rate is .0065. That means if I trade a 10k lot, my costs are $135 each way. Since these tickers rarely move more that a nickel a day and most only move one or two cents, it hardly seems worthwhile. So I reached out to CMEG and was told 2 things. First, I as told I needed to learn how to add liquidity back to the market to reduce my ECN costs. Second, I was told to contact my trading community to find out what the discounted OTC commission rate is. So, how do I add liquidity back to the market in a way that reduces the ECN fees and do we have a discounted OTC commission rate or a commission cap with CMEG? Paying a broker $70 to execute a trade one way is unrealistic. Thanks, Joey

IB Article on fees or credits for removing or adding liquidity to the market, respectively. Read more here: https://ibkr.info/node/201