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I feel some of the same things as OP and Handle. I used to be scratching out ticks for peanuts each day but a couple years later and lots of trial and error I've found enough niche versions of the HG that I'm deciding between retiring and starting a fund. The best ideas are worth big amounts...

Well in stocks if your fill rates are terrible you may get IB fined by the exchange and they'll bill you for that, but that's not an IB issue and plenty under your own control. On the other hand, they flat won't let you quote both sides of an option contract at the same time regardless.

There's no problem with equities at IB; there is with options and I think it's a business decision and not a regulatory one.

Only if you lose money!

Shall we apply the part you quoted to a penny stock? 2500 shares at $0.10 = $250, commission cap of 0.5% of notional = $1.25. You think it would be $0.005/share or $12.50, wrong by a factor of 10.

You can believe what you want, but I've got fills from today for about that size and the cost was $3-4 not $12.50. Honestly, $3-4 isn't a great price compared to some other places if you can get $2-3 flat rate trades, but it's not what you're quoting. Did you even read the "maximum commission"...

The max IB commission is 0.5% plus regulatory fees, usually that applies to stocks under $1 rather than the $0.005/share rate.

I don't see these as good as you say. First, you won't get NMS protection, so you may miss out on fills that way. Second, you pay higher commissions since the rebates for displayed liquidity are several times higher than for hidden liquidity. Lastly, like any limit order, if you don't react...

You may find this FAQ useful http://www.sec.gov/divisions/marketreg/rule611faq.pdf

Sure, but the regulators need something ambiguous and illegal they can pin on people they don't like. That's almost all they've been doing in recent years - making up negative sounding names for things that happen in the market in the normal course of events and declaring that they might be...

I wouldn't turn down 20%, but I wouldn't stop looking for better things either. With enough leverage, you may only need to make 5-10% with low risk before leverage and it can turn into something reasonable.

If NYSE opens late, as it often does, some sites may report the first trade after 9:30am, which may not be NYSE. In fact, the NYSE auction can trade through the other exchanges' prices and give you a really bad price. Not a market order I hope. I would ask your broker.

Not trading the close, apparently.

A lot of brokers won't itemize this and you just get a daily or monthly total borrow interest expense item. For these, I think the best option is to treat it as investment interest expense and either deduct it on Sch A (itemized) or Sch C (business expense) depending on if you meet the IRS...

Here I was thinking this would be $1.48M, which would have been respectable. If you're doing it right, the market could fall all it wants and you wouldn't have to deposit more - make up for the long losses with gains on your shorts.

Yeah, I think they'd have to spin out everything else. That way you're left holding the restricted stock in a YHOO shell. But the management wouldn't spin themselves off of the BABA value, because they wouldn't have enough cash to subsidize their salaries/endeavors if they did that.

And after taxes, Yahoo will waste it on some ill-conceived acquisitions and management salaries. If they cared about their shareholders, they'd have spun the BABA stake off so you could keep it without paying taxes (or spun the YHOO part out and left the BABA as the core, same effect).

This isn't out of the ordinary, even GM did it. What does it matter who gets the IPO shares, if the price and number are the same? I mean, unless you personally were hoping to get some, in which case there are fewer for you and more for Ma's friends.

I've hit this problem in equities and it's bad there too. If a stock gaps enough, even for just a dividend never mind serious news, you may be effectively unable to participate in the premarket or open until some of the new trades go off. I agree the easiest thing, if they're worried about...

That strikes me as an exaggeration, or at least misleading(*). For example, a quick check shows that something like 1/4 of OTC stocks are above $1, while about 3/4 are penny stocks. Sure some of the higher ones will go out of business, but a few of the penny stocks will turn into real...