Well anything can happen but they are not planing to pass it through in the near future Fidelity does not pass it through so I don't see how they are planing to compete by raising the prices They are a large company so I am sure they can absorb those fees with selling other products
I agree, anything can happen. But really, I don't see them supporting that with active traders. For SPX Options, the Exchange fee (0.45), SEC fee(0.04), ORF fee(0.04), and FINRA fee(0.02), works out to 55 cents to close, and a bit less to open. On a single butterly, 4 contracts, that's over $2.00 that SCHW owes to regulatory authorities. At full commission rates of 65 cents per contract, they are making a dime on each lot. Maybe so, but for active traders, brokerages generally give very discounted rates. So that means they are losing money with very active traders. Even very large firms won't absorb that for long.
The catch here is whether SCHW routes direct to the exchanges or uses PFOF (Payment for Order Flow). Most serious traders won't stick around if the latter. That's how firms like RobinHood can offer "FREE" trades. That's another thread entirely. I've closed accounts with some fairly big name firms because they've started routing to other firms for PFOF.
Is your current commission at TD lower than the current commission at Schwab ? If it is I imagine you will not get a lower commission than Schwab
Yes, it is. I know a number of other traders with similar discounts. If indeed they don't charge the fees on a passthrough, then net-net I'm OK since paying the 65 cents will be like having a 10 cent commission per lot, plus fees.
I did not see any indication that the platform will not be used in the future That's almost a guarantee that they will loose customers I am sure they will not do that What they might do is to start charging a fee for the platform which is still not good but better than not having it at all
I received one of these emails like we got last week about a year or more ago with language like "rest assured that we will take the best of the ThinkorSwim plaform and integrate these features into our trading tools" not those words exactly, but scary like that. "best" for them is not likely something we'd agree upon. It was great to see this email from SCHW this week. But not completely relieving.
What I did not like about Schwab is that they rejected my futures account application while I was approved at TD So the margin department is more strict at Schwab I hope it will stay that way after the move
Supposedly, all of our trading permissions will remain. This leaves me hopeful for trading Equity Indexes in all of my accounts.
One other possible issue is the fact that you are only allowed one margin account under the same name
I know a few years ago after one merger I had 2 accounts at one brokerage and after using it for almost a year suddenly one of my accounts was converted to cash so I had to move it out
Maybe now they have some kind of grandfather clause where in case of a merger they can overlook that law
Haha, yes, that would be awesome. I've never seen any corporate actions like mergers permitting anything to be overlooked, especially laws. I'm not sure about the total number of margin accounts being SEC-driven or driven by internal bank/brokerage policy. I've certainly had sub-accounts on several of my brokerage and trading accounts before, but I know this varies by firm.
Some of my TDA accounts come from a previous Scottrade merger. That went smoothly, but I've had other accounts at firms which got acquired and they reset everything from commission discounts to trading approvals.
Another aspect of this whole ToS transition is the API. I've heard that they are working on a new version. The TDA API is used not only for Excel sheet quotes and other side programming work, but also the data feed to ONE and OptionVue. This could break, or go away for a while.
