Recommendations for low commission brokers?
Long story short, someone wants to avoid frictional costs when dollar cost averaging into individual stocks.
(Please, no opinions on the strategy itself :-))
I believe IB has a $100K minimum to avoid $10/month (or $3 for young people); BofA has free trades if you keep $25K in cash (not securities). Anybody else?
I wouldn’t worry too much about $10 per month if you have a sizeable account, even if that amount is less than $100k. If you make 10 trades a month (or 5 back and forth trades), your commisions are counted against the $10, I believe. That’s a pretty low barrier. Do just one or two trades on several other platforms and you’re already out the same.
I’d agree with recommending IB. You can’t do any better than $1-2 commissions on stock/ETF trades and if you are DCAing, the $120/year (which is likely to be a max charge since as bchad mentioned commissions are subtracted from the monthly fee) IB would cost you is equal to only 17 trades as scottrade. That’s a pretty low breakeven if you ask me.
My firm only let’s me have accounts with certain brokers, but if I had my choice, I would use IB. Low fee and from what I’ve heard they have a solid API.