Leaderboard

As a European resident and thus a non-US citizen, I'm engaged in financial trading through a brokerage account that I opened with Tradier in September 2023. This journey to establish my account took approximately six weeks, primarily due to the meticulous compliance process at Firstrade. My first trading activity was executed on September 27th. In line with standard industry practices, I receive individual confirmations for each trade I conduct, which includes specific confirmations for each options trade. Additionally, to keep track of my financial activities and portfolio performance, Firstrade provides me with a comprehensive monthly statement.

You mean $0.42 per open + $0.42 per close for $0.84 round-trip? Because using Tradier in 2023, I opened 318 total VIX option contracts + closed all 318 of those contracts and my total commissions/pass-thru fees was $525.10. That $525.10 / 636 total contracts = $0.825 per contract traded. And according to Tradier's website, they charge: $0.35/contract Commission $0.045/contract Clearing fees $0.40/contract Single listed option index fee --------------- $0.795/contract total cost (+ ORF regulatory fees which Tradier says are $0.02905/contract but they change periodically

This is actually an excellent question. Lets take an example of 5 trades per month returning 10% each. Some services would report it as sum of all trades (50% return). This assumes that you had just one trade open at any given time and allocated 100% of your portfolio to each trade. But some services would report it this way even if they had more than one trade open which would make it simply impossible to allocate 100% to each trade. The next method is to report an average of all trades. This assumes you allocated 20% per trade, with no cash balance. Some services specifically recommend to keep at least 20% of the portfolio in cash, but report performance based on full allocation. This is simply not realistic and not reproducible. I report model portfolio performance based on my recommended allocation of 10%. So in the above example, I would report 5% since I allocated 10% per trade and had 10% return per trade. For my portfolio, I have maximum 6 position at any given time, so 40% of the portfolio is in cash, but I still report return on the whole portfolio, not on the maximum invested capital. This reporting is called cash adjusted because it takes the cash reserves into consideration. Reporting returns this way grossly underestimates the return compared to other services, but I want to be as realistic and transparent as possible. My model portfolio performance reports what was possible with fairly conservative allocation.