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Thanks, @volatility trader, @rasar, @krisbee. I'll be patient a wee bit longer, I guess, to see if it improves But I had two more lagging trades today vs TOS (one being closing out the QQQ combo, the other the new NKE hedged strangle), so I'm losing patience rapidly. (I submitted the Tradier ones first, BTW, in case there were liquidity issues. But TOS was still immediate, Tradier was quite a bit longer.)

A follow-up email from their customer service postulated that TOS might be filling some trades internally. I'm not convinced that explains everything I'm seeing.

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9 minutes ago, rasar said:

That's weird. I can get to SO, but not to Tradier and some others.

It seems to have fixed itself. Must have had some funky network issues. I'm out of the country, so who knows. Thanks for all the quick checks.

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4 minutes ago, Gen88 said:

Has anyone heard of Surgetrader? Want to get some views on it.

thanks.

Yes I have, I’ve done some research on them before. They’re a trader evaluation firm, not a broker. Their broker is an outfit called EightCap out of somewhere in the Caribbean. They (SurgeTrader) supposedly figured out how to structure things so that a US citizen can trade CFDs (which is normally illegal for retail) through them. 
 

I have no info on whether they’re any good or not, I haven’t used them. However, you do need to understand that EightCap trades all over-the-counter products, nothing is on an exchange. If you ever read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, CFD brokers are the modern day equivalent of the old bucket shops. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as the brokerage is on the up and up. CFDs allow for very precise position sizing, much like Forex. Also, CFDs typically cover a large variety of products: indices, single stocks, metals, energies, crypto, currencies, etc. 

 

All that needs to be weighed against the fact that you’re trading a broker-created instrument that (ostensibly) tracks the underlying asset, not the asset itself. 

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On 8/14/2023 at 9:39 AM, siddharth said:

Is paying 55c per contract with no ticket fee considered expensive ? 

The standard around the industry right now looks to be 65c with no ticket fee, so it's better than that. However, you can do much better with someone like Tradier or Firstrade if your trading fits into their parameters. For example, Tradier is a flat $10 a month for no options commissions at all (except index options), but you will pay $10 for each option that expires or is exercised. That can be very painful if you're not aware of it. Firstrade on the other hand has no commissions on any options at all, not even index options, but they do not allow time spreads (calendars and diagonals) on index options.

You absolutely have to read the fine print of the fee schedules and understand your own trading to find out what your real costs would be.

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