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At 11:58 PM 2/29/2004, RB wrote:
>Any opinions on any of the above brokers etc., especialy about all fees would be helpfull.
I did a search last summer and found there is little material difference between the major brokers on commissions and fees. Commissions and fees are now so low that they are basically irrelevant. What matters now is the quality of fills, customer support, trading platform, etc. A few pennies difference on a fill totally swamps and difference in commissions for me.
I settled on Fidelity Active Trader for securities because of the quality of the fills. They somehow seem to break a large market order into small pieces and dribble it out, resulting in fills often between the bid and ask. They answer the phone in one or two rings and fix things quickly. The order-entry software is very convenient and allows entering dozens of orders in a table format with sorting capabilities by account, symbol, etc. You cannot import the orders from a file as you can with Fidelity's Advisor Channel software but that is not a major problem for me.
I settled on TradeStation 7 for futures. I use TradeStation of charting and system development and their data-on-demand is a real timesaver. I get instant fills on market orders and the TradeManager functions let you see everything you need and copy/paste to Excel. This weekend I tried downloading all my orders since June, copied and pasted them into Excel and checked them. They were perfect - no errors or missing trades on hundreds of trades. (Their monthly statements were not as accurate.) They also answer the phone and fix things my mistakes quickly (moving trades to the correct account, etc.) The same things are available in securities accounts but I haven't any experience with them. They still have different accounts for futures and securities which is a bit of a pain so you have to wire funds from one to the other. But all-in-all it works very well. I plan to try their automated order entry capability from a TradeStation strategy soon. EasyLanguage now has lots of new functions to check account positions, balances, etc.
Bob Fulks
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