Anyone have any recommendations or ones I should stay away from? For context, I'm grandfathered into Thinkorswim's old commissions (Rates and Commissions - Stock Brokerage - Option Brokerage - Discount Brokerage Firm) of I typically only trade 1-5 contracts at a time (but I trade quite a bit) and only occasionally do spreads or multi-legged options. So, these fees are WAY better than the ripoff amount that TD Ameritrade normally charges. I've been told by others like folks on Seeking Alpha that my $2.95 is really expensive and that I should try to negotiate it down or switch brokers. It does really cut into my gain (or even chance of profit) when doing multi-legged options (e.g. RIC). Just to do a single RIC costs me $11.80 in commission to enter and another $11.80 to exit. A single straddle/strangle or call/put spread is $5.90 to enter, another $5.90 to exit. I've been told about http://individuals.interactivebrokers.com/en/p.php?f=commission but their fee schedule looks daunting and they have all these goofy data fees and they charge to cancel/modify orders (there's a complicated algorithm for that too). The base option commission is $0.70/contract w/a $1/min per order which is incredibly cheap compared to TOS. I've also heard their customer service sucks. I've been busy looking over fees from the list at Barron's Annual Online Broker Survey - Barrons.com and can post what I come up with in terms of ones that would be cheaper for my type of trading. MB Trading - Commissions looks really great in terms of pricing but I'd never heard of them (nor 1/2 of the brokerages on Barron's list). Another big plus for me would be being able to download gain/loss data directly into Turbotax. TD Ameritrade/Thinkorswim lets me do that thru GainsKeeper for free. I also like how TDAM and TOS let me close out short option position when they're down to $0.05 or less for no commission. I wouldn't care much about stock trading (TOS's commissions are fine w/me for that) and don't do forex and futures.
