What Retail Stock or Bond Brokers to Use?
There has been a conversation in the comments about what brokerage firm to use.
The fact is, in order to take advantage of the opportunities on this blog, you need to use only the most sophisticated retail brokerages, namely Thinkorswim and Interactive Brokers.
Thinkorswim has the best user interface and the best customer service. They have a cool iphone application now. They are pretty good at borrowing stocks for shorting. Also, I reluctantly trade bonds through them. They are the best retail bond broker I have found which isn't saying much.
Interactive Brokers has awful 1995 graphic design user interfaces. Also their customer service is terrible. (And people say that they cater to sophisticated users, but the problem is you can have a snafu caused by the broker and it's nice to be able to resolve it instantly ala Thinkorswim.) They are the best at locating stocks to short. They even have a web interface open to the public where you can check shortability. They have the makings of great bond trading system (you can trade directly through the web app), but there is some compatibility problem that prevents lots of common bonds from being available to trade. I hope they fix this.
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They are the best at locating stocks to short. They even have a web interface open to the public where you can check shortability.
I did that last week for GGC, and they said 700sh were available.
It's now hard to borrow everywhere.
Very disappointing!
And CBOE did not create a new option series today!
For me it's really hopeless at this point -- trying to capitalize on this GGC farce.
I admit Etrade is pretty bad. I was looking for a quick daytrade on the short side of ARMH when it touched 8, and Etrade either could not or would not supply the shares. I had to do the trade at Schwab, which costs more. Pretty damn lame. Not to mention ETFC's going concern issue.
But then I'm only at Etrade as a former Brown&Co customer; Etrade still lets me trade for 5 bucks, otherwise I'd be gone.
It takes a while to get a new acct going.
IB trades are pretty cheap.
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