No. of Recommendations: 2
rayvt: But Schwab, Etrade, IBKR -- all charge $0.65 per contract. That would more than double the price!
elan: Umm, I don't think so. When the ask for an option contract is 0.60, you're actually buying a contract for 100 shares at $60.00. So the commission is 1% of the buy price.
Guys, you are trading the wrong (too cheap) options. Today I bought a shitload of options at Schwab. For each trade Schwab's fee resulted in around 0.05%, a fee I couldn't care less about. Neither today nor in the past as I was never interested in contracts selling for pennies (Is that then called "Penny contracts", as in "Penny stocks"? 😂)
Jim: FWIW, I've averaged $0.0289 per contract in the last week at IB.
Therefore I have a super user-friendly options chain screen, real-time quotes, can change a bid with a few clicks within seconds etc. etc.
Yes, I believe you if you'd tell me that all of that I could do in my IB account too --- but I am not willing to spend many hours to find out how and to get accustomed to it. No need for that with Schwab when trading options - and fee-wise it's practically free for me, see above (Who cares about 0.05%, especially with options?).
After having collected enough experience now with IB I will use this account for the main reason I set it up, to diversify brokers (and to buy only stuff I intend to hold forever, so that hopefully I'll not have to trade in my IB account, especially not options).
