I've been using Interactive Brokers (IB) a lot lately. Here's the good and bad.
Trades for $6 or 0.08% ie less than $7500 value only pay $6. But this is on a per order per day basis. If your $10k order gets half executed on two days, you'll pay $6 each day.
You don't get your own HIN, IB is the custodian. This means that you don't get paperwork for proxies etc and it also makes things like rights issues a pain.
Lots of foreign markets, options, futures sell short etc. I've only done ASX stocks and SPI futures but the futures rate is $5 per contract to trade.
Good online reports that you can generate yourself.
Had a few software problems with their platform but is now stable. I suggest running from a local copy and installing to the default directory.
They charge for data, even ASX data, for which you pay something like $30 per month. Eg, I'm not paying for NYSE data or NYMEX so I can't see prices for US stocks and futures.
Biggest plus is that they have a bunch of software interfaces, DDE to Excel, Java, C++ etc. so you can, in theory, write your own code to trade amd make money while you sleep.
Major drawbacks. You can't see market depth or bid/ask prices before the market opens. The platform, trader workstation or TWS only shows yesterday's closing price. Likewise the DDE interface doesn't get any ASX price data until the stocks trade. SFE data flows out of hours OK. I've been using CommSec to view depth then trading on IB.
I like IB because I do a lot of short term low value trades around $10k on a lot of different stocks and this is cheap. ($8 for $10k)
I'm looking for another data provider with software interface, perhaps Paritech. Any suggestions?
