You buy a stock at the ask or sell at the bid. Some brokers will fill you at the bid or ask, but some brokers will do a better job and get a fill price in between or totally beat the spread. If you trade a lot those gifts of pennies per share can really add up to big money throughout the year. Share your opinions and experiences on which broker does the best for their customers and which ones do not.
Survey: Which broker gives the best/worst fill prices?
- Thread starter wpost
- Start date
Broker's job is simply to send your orders to exchanges, so a broker shouldn't have control of how your orders are filled, unless they get in the way.
So it should be a broker that doesn't make choices for you, allowing you to decide how you route your orders, and test and choose best routes, order types, etc.
IB supports a lot of order types and custom routes, but I'm not sure which major brokers wouldn't.
So it should be a broker that doesn't make choices for you, allowing you to decide how you route your orders, and test and choose best routes, order types, etc.
IB supports a lot of order types and custom routes, but I'm not sure which major brokers wouldn't.
I would agree with your basic premise. However, when you select a broker's smart/auto routing for your order, one broker can do a better job than another. A broker can send your order to his "partner" and you get 1/100 of a penny price improvement while another broker looking out for his customers can send your order somewhere else and get you a few pennies or a sell at the ask or a buy at the bid. In fact, having split simultaneous and identical orders among several brokers you can see the differences in fill prices. If you send your order to an ECN you'll get no price improvement and if you take liquidity at some point your broker will be discussing how you have to pay the exchange fees. So a brokers smart routing avoids that problem. So it comes down to what a broker considers "smart" when they route your order. Smart for you or smart for them?
Yes, so just avoid brokers that take payments for order flow. But all that is subjective because you’ll get different results at different times, or may just think you are getting better fills at some point.
I actually got better fills on option combos via Robinhood than via Interactive Brokers, seriously. And that happened multiple times to my amazement, and I still can’t explain it. I only suspect that their partner MMs can do a better job in calculating the value and finding liquidity, or making mistakes and wanting to be first to grab stuff when they know the order is coming from Robinhood.
So for options I’d recommend Robinhood, at the risk of being locked up in an asylum.
Thanks for the info! For a long time Schwab and Ameritrade did a fine job of price improvement for stocks. Even $1 stocks that are suddenly active. But in the last month or two Ameritrade gets almost no price improvements. Its become a joke among trading buddies that if you got filled at $X.0001 on a sell and $X.9999 on a buy you placed your order through Ameritade. At the same time buddies are getting filled at bid/ask on buy/sells when using Fidelity. You start to think about changing brokers when you keep seeing the same thing trade after trade, day after day.
As long as you are using an ECN broker, you don’t have to worry about getting your order filled at the best price. It is only in some cases that your broker may trade against and make you lose, but that’s when you trade with ones where dealing desks are involved.