|
|
Interactive Brokers vs Sharebuilder
|
Sharebuilder vs Interactive Brokers: Commissions, Fees and Investments 2012
|
|
- Stocks and ETFs: $0.005 per share with $1 minimum per trade for SMART routed orders
- Options: $0.70 per contract plus exchange fees
- Mutual funds: $14.95 per transaction
- Investment products: stocks, options, ETFs, bonds, futures, currency transactions
- Minimum to open Interactive Brokers account: $10,000 for non-IRA account, $5,000 for IRA account
- All Interactive Brokers fees
|
- Stocks and ETFs Basic plan: $9.95 real-time trades; $4 per Automatic Investment
- Stocks and ETFs Advantage plan: $7.95 real-time trades; first 12 Automatic Investment per month included, $1 per additional investment
- Advantage plan comes with $12 monthly fee
- Options: Basic plan - $9.95 per online trade + $1.25 per contract; Advantage plan - $7.95 per online trade + $0.75 per contract
- Mutual funds: $19.95 for 170 no-load funds from leading no-load mutual fund families; 70 free funds including the ING mutual funds
- Investment products: stocks, options, mutual funds, ETFs
- Minimum to open Sharebuilder account: $0
- All Sharebuilder fees
|
|
|
-
Low stock commissions for orders with 800 shares or less
- Professional trading platform
- Great margin rates
|
- Very low Automatic Investing Plans costs
- Free dividend and capital gains reinvestment
- Ability to buy fractions of a stock
- $0 to open cash account, $2,000 for margin account
|
|
|
- $10,000 minimum to open most accounts
- $30/month minimum commission requirement to avoid $10/month fee ($20/month fee if account balance less than $2,000)
- $10/month for IB market data feed (waived if trade commissions are more than $30/month)
- $7.50 quarterly fee on IRA accounts ($30 per year)
- Fees on modified or canceled orders
- Trader Workstation is designed for professional traders, it is not intuitive; difficult to learn
- Expensive to make trades with over 1,500 shares
- A lot of complains about snobby customer service (experienced it ourselves)
- $1.20 fee to modify or cancel an option order
- Merciless margin tightening and margin calls - IB doesn't care if their customers get completely wiped out
|
- Real-time trades at $9.95 are expensive
- $0.007 per share surcharge on real-time trades on penny stocks (subject to a maximum of 15% of the principal amount of the trade, but no less than the base commission)
- Customers can't specify at what price investments with Automatic Investing Plans are bought/sold
- Very basic trading tools
- Customer service complaints
- Terrible executions
- Few mutual fund choices
- No beneficiary option (important for customers with families)
|
Interactive Brokers vs Sharebuilder: Comparison Summary
Interactive Brokers (Interactive Brokers Review) and
ShareBuilder (ShareBuilder Review)
couldn't be more different. IB is targeting very active and experienced traders. Sharebuilder customers are mostly automatic plan
investors. Interactive Brokers has much better commissions, in fact it's one of the
cheapest stock brokers (for orders of fewer than 500 shares).
The firm charges $0.005 per share with $1 minimum per trade versus
$10 per per trade at Sharebuilder.
Interactive Brokers has $30 per month minimum commission requirement to avoid $10 monthly inactivity fee
($20 per month for accounts with less than $2,000) and $10 monthly
market data fee. This means that clients who rarely trade might pay up to $240 per year in fees!
Both brokerage firms are not well suited for beginners. If you are new to investing, you are better off
with one of the firms that are in our Best Brokers for Beginner list.
Between these two discount brokers Interactive Brokers would be our pick for active traders. We suggest investors read our
Best Brokers article, where we list firms
that are not as expensive as Sharebuilder and don't have customer service issues and fees that plague Interactive Brokers.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|