Well, it's nice to see that there have been improvements in the commish calculation at the discount houses. For the longest time, it was same side, same price or else it would go on another ticket.
I spent my 14 year career prior to my "retirement" from the office this year working at brokerage houses in Vancouver. I ended my tour of duty in the business after 9 years at Canaccord which was preceded by stints at several other firms.
I am used to trading with traders. In fact, many times when I trade I would just walk up to the trader and say, buy this or sell that...and I wouldn't even bother to name the price because they had a much better feel for the stock (I only traded stocks in play). They would just peer up from the machine and tell me I was filled at whatever.
Especially in Toronto where the short sale is so easy, I'll just pick up the phone and say sell 10,000 short...they ask at what price...I say "around here, you know what to do"...
There is another issue for using a full service firm. For example, at Canaccord, their full discount commish is the same or lower than TD Greenline and you don't have to worry about things like margin if you've got decent equity in the account. For example, I could be offside by 200% for a couple of day or more and nobody seems to care. The amount of money that I can make on the added size more than compensates for whatever commish I *might* save at a discount broker. In fact, I make all my U.S. trades through them also, because of this feature.
For futures, I trade using Lind Waldock's lind-waldock.com Lind Online Direct (to the S&P futures pit) and it's been great. I would seem to me that web brokers are very complicated and I have heard horror stories from many people trading equities on the net. Count me out for now.
What have you been trading lately? Anything interesting in play other than BII? I just got Canadian data feed again with Aspen Graphics and will be able to trade Canadian stocks again tomorrow. |
