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Great, thanks very much, and for your other great postings as well. Looking forward to seeing how your Tradier trading goes.

I just point out those fees as some brokers eat the OCC fee themselves (in fact, Tradier did until a few months ago) so one can do a correct head to head cost comparison. I have contacted Tradier's trade desk (more often than I care to admit) and that's how I originally discovered the unfriendly margin treatment as the culprit for the large amount of missing buying power. They claimed the margin requirement was being imposed by their clearing firm, and they offered to restore the missing buying power for the day within their backend system. However, they claimed I needed to call them every morning thereafter as long as that position was on to have the buying power restored. Additionally, they did warn me that if my trading exceeded the buying power beyond what the clearing firm required, I would receive a margin call the next morning. I decided at that point not to do those types of trades there. As far a execution, I have not noticed any differences with other major brokerage accounts I have, although I did run into some strange incidents recently of having the exact same order stall at TOS but be filled at Tradier. I didn't follow up on this any further and don't have any hard data to prove Tradier is better. I hope this helps. Tim

Bear in mind as I think this was already mentioned earlier in this thread, even though they state the commissions are only the flat fee, you will pay regulatory fees of about 0.09 to 0.11 per contract. For example, on a 20-lot calendar spread I traded yesterday on an equity, according to the trade confirmation statement I paid 3.86 in these fees on the 40 contracts transaction. You may or may not already be paying with these extra fees with your broker, and usually need to check the trade confirmation statements to see them as they don't always show up in the trading platform. Also, they are not margin friendly when it comes to unbalanced flies. As soon as you break a fly/condor or make the wings unbalanced, the margin relief for the credit spread side goes away (at least the last time I traded one, sometime earlier this year). And yes, no calendar spreads on cash-settled options. Just some surprises I've noticed. Tim

I will be opening an account with Tradier (even though I love OptionsXpress and will be keeping them as well) as the no commission offer needs to be tested in my opinion. Here is my rationale: 1. $40 a month for unlimited option trades will add between 10% and 20% to the annual return if execution is consistent with IB/OX. 2. I think it will be based on order routing history. I have attached the order routing for both IB (as most members use them) and Tradier. Tradier sends its order directly to market makers (with Citadel handling about half the option orders) whereas IB sends directly to the exchange. This would be a deficiency if we were trading high frequency equities, etc. but is not a deficiency when trading option spreads with limit orders. Citadel and the other MM's that Tradier uses employ very sophisticated smart routing technology which is very similar to IB. Here is the Citadel description: "We act as a specialist or market maker in more than 3,000 U.S. listed-options names, representing 99% of traded volume2, and rank as a top liquidity provider on the major U.S. options exchanges, executing approximately 37% of all U.S.-listed retail volume, making us the industry’s top wholesale market maker". Therefore, when we extrapolate further, the Citadel routing is even more diverse than IB with regard to the amount of exchanges. Also, IB's routing to the Boston Options Exchange which they have a very large ownership of (a clear conflict of interest), continues to grow. 3. The Dynamic Trend Option Dynamics platform accessible through Tradier, is one of the absolute best option platforms available. I have used OptionVue, ONE, Option Work Bench and others and Option Dynamics beats them all. They offer superior skew charting, spread future price projection, spread builder, theta decay charting and other modeling components superior to the others. Furthermore, it is fully integrated, meaning not only can you trade from the platform but there is also a real time portfolio window that shows holdings with P&L etc. found directly in the platform. Therefore, there is no need to move back and fourth between Option Dynamics and the Tradier website (like with ONE). I have not used Option Dynamics with Tradier yet so I still need to determine if there are any pitfalls. If we go in under the SO offer, the platform cost will not be discounted. However, for me the free option trades is a 10 fold savings over the $250 monthly cost of the platform. I will report on this thread once I am active with Tradier at some point in the 3rd quarter. Tradier Order_Routing_Disclosure_2016q4.pdf 1Q_2017_IB_ORDER_ROUTING_REPORT.pdf

Interesting thing to stumble upon. Essentially, you are buying WEEKLY verticals, doing that every week ONLY during the first 30 days after earnings. Then, you essentially take the next two months off until earnings hits again, then you start up again the day after earnings, but only for a month again. I think it's important to study the individual trades in the trade log section. Having just purchased a subscription yesterday, it only took me my first simulation to find a couple potential bugs, which greatly affected the results. In this case of TSLA, it's interesting to see the individual trade results, and how each month after earnings did. Here's a quick rundown of some of the 30-day periods, based on 1-lot, 40d-20d verticals: 2/10/16 $1619 (all 5 winning trades) 5/4/16 $-147 (1 winner, 1 scratch, 3 losers) 8/3/16 $-479 (all 5 losing trades) 10/26/16 $-137 (4 losing, 1 winner) And here's where it gets interesting... Next position opened is March 3rd. But earnings was on 2/22. So it entered a trade this time 7 days after earnings, not 1. Looks like potential bug #1, or wrong earnings date data. Then, instead of stopping the weekly trades after a month (~5 trades like in other cycles), it just kept going and going until today, 9 trades later. This would appear to be bug #2. The first 5 trades netted $827 (3 win, 2 losers), and the next 4 trades netted $-30.

Hi guys, it's been a while... BIDU reports on April 27 (confirmed). I entered a 3-week P175 calendar today @ $1.09 & 1.10. Long May 19, short April 28. We paid in the previous cycle $1.40 & $1.45 for a similar spread (strikes were slightly higher). Sold it for $1.45 & $1.60. So if history repeats itself, current entry prices are very attractive.