Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Commission Fees

About a year and a half ago i left the blue bank to go work at the green bank.

Being a bit lazy / nostalgic / comfortable, I kept trading at the blue bank.

Recently though I've been feeling like a bit of a bad team player by doing this, so I moved the proceeds of one option trade over. The plan was to buy 30 contracts of E-Trade April 4 Calls in my green bank discount brokerage account. Total would be about $1300 + commission. But holy sticker shock batman!!! The cost of the same trade at the green bank is a whopping $145! vs a paltry $43 at the blue bank! That's over 10% of the cost of the trade! The option would have to go up over 25% just to break even! Needless to say I will now have to rethink my trade.

Now I obviously want to be a good corporate citizen, but this differential in cost makes it pretty tough to do so - at least with respect to option trades.

At any rate, I'm going to have to explore some alternatives here, because this is definitely not a good scene.

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