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I wanted to ask if anyone here uses Interactive Brokers?
In Canada it seems like Quest trade and Wealth simple are the 2 low cost brokers where you will have no fees for TFSA's and other registered accounts, and can even buy ETF's without any commission, which are nice features. But I think one of them has only TSX stocks, and the other one has really bad currency conversion rates.
And then there's the big 5 banks, TD where you essentially get ameritrade, and RBC is another notable one. Seems to have most of the bells and whistles you need... However:
With TD I get margin at 2.75%, which is decent, but still more than twice of IB. And last time I bought a US stock was GME like 6 months back, but I remember that the conversion between US and CAD set me back like 0.5% each way. I always hear than IB is very complicated, and it's meant for active traders...
But say you're someone who's been around for a while, uses margin, does like 5-10 trades per year, and wants to be able to purchase in many markets, as well as sell CC's and CSP's. Is it a good option? I guess I fail to see what it means for something to be too complex, like you should be able to discard data that isn't useful in your situation. It's like when overclocking a processor or RAM, you have a million timings that aren't needed to be tweaked, so you don't look at them.
I'm with TD right now, and they are not awful, they just don't do things amazing. I like margin, my risk profile is essentially infinite, only thing that matters to me is expected return per investment, and you can choose position sizes carefully to control risk exposure. So lower margin rates = good. And also because I'm wanting to sell calls and puts, I need to work in US markets, as the options market is very small in Canada, and with normal currency exchange costs, it becomes an unviable strategy as the currency exchange will eat half of my costs. And the additional benefit of being able to buy stocks on other exchanges also seems good. For most part my plays are boring, but I've seen opportunities here and there where it would have made sense.
Anyway, was just hoping for a perspective or two 
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On July 01 2021 02:07 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2021 01:22 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Until the fines exceeds the gains then this type of Corruption will continue.
Edit: I assumed it was GME related. It was not. It’s from the bug in March 2020 where their code couldn’t work out why Feb 28 wasn’t followed by Mar 1. They had the same issue in 2016 apparently. + Show Spoiler [Completely irrelevant] +My understanding is that when a broker places a buy order they don’t hand over cash immediately and they don’t receive the stock immediately. However the buying broker is obliged to provide the stock to their customer, having taken their money. Similarly the broker for the sell side is obliged to take the stock off of their customer and give them cash. This creates counterparty risk for the brokers. If I tell Robinhood to sell my GameStop share for $400 and they find another broker who agrees to buy the share for one of their customers for $400 then Robinhood takes my share and gives me $400. They then need to make the exchange with the other broker and if they fail to complete that exchange then they’re stuck holding my share with no cash. As a middle man they make their money connecting two entities which want to transact but default by one entity doesn’t absolve responsibility to the other.
For most things the risk is relatively low and the brokers have collateral posted to prevent any kind of issues. The stock doesn’t fluctuate too much, the volume of any given stock isn’t too high, and so with collateral posted with the clearing house the exchanges should be safe.
During the GameStop mania Robinhood basically got margin called. The clearing house risk equation demanded substantially more collateral than before because of the volume and volatility of the trades coming out of Robinhood. They couldn’t post the collateral and so were unable to operate as a middle man.
It’s grossly incompetent of them to not have sufficient liquidity to perform the basic middle man function that is their entire business and a lot of innocent people got fucked because of it. But I don’t think it’s corruption. I used to but the counterparty risk clearing house collateral explanation, combined with the volume and volatility inputs going off the charts, makes a fair amount of sense to me.
That's how I understand it too, no idea about how much time it needs to spend in this clearing house. I agree that it's grossly incompetent. If I'm able to get two million liability insurance for my car for $1000 per year, I feel like it shouldn't be that difficult for them to have say $10bil liquidity in the clearing house. That is pretty risk free money for the clearing house, plus they can work closely with Robinhood and check all their systems in place to very accurately calculate the risk. Heck, if I have cash in my account, for a very small fee, I would be okay if they would hold my money for a day to complete the transaction.
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Far as brokers go, my primary requirements these days are that their core system is stable (i.e. won't get screwed out of my money), they are a real business with a phone number I can call if I need support, and they give me a wide range of asset classes that I can invest in. I am admittedly too wimpy to use margin so I don't really care about that. For IBKR I hear mostly mediocre things, but they seem to service a lot of countries (great for East Europe) and give good rates on margin. Good if that's your thing, I suppose, but not for me.
On another note, does anyone have a good sense of how silver works? I put a pretty sizeable position in gold since I'm looking for a hedge against inflation that doesn't have the same downside potential as doubling down as absurdly overpriced US stocks. Silver is often bundled together with gold in being useful for that, but clearly behaves differently in the short and long term. I am mostly inclined to conclude that it's just a worse version of gold (which I mostly treat as "inflation-adjusted cash"), but given that it's definitely an important precious metal I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing about the mechanics of silver that anyone else knows about.
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On July 01 2021 23:36 LegalLord wrote:
Far as brokers go, my primary requirements these days are that their core system is stable (i.e. won't get screwed out of my money), they are a real business with a phone number I can call if I need support, and they give me a wide range of asset classes that I can invest in. I am admittedly too wimpy to use margin so I don't really care about that. For IBKR I hear mostly mediocre things, but they seem to service a lot of countries (great for East Europe) and give good rates on margin. Good if that's your thing, I suppose, but not for me.
On another note, does anyone have a good sense of how silver works? I put a pretty sizeable position in gold since I'm looking for a hedge against inflation that doesn't have the same downside potential as doubling down as absurdly overpriced US stocks. Silver is often bundled together with gold in being useful for that, but clearly behaves differently in the short and long term. I am mostly inclined to conclude that it's just a worse version of gold (which I mostly treat as "inflation-adjusted cash"), but given that it's definitely an important precious metal I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing about the mechanics of silver that anyone else knows about.
Not an expert, but this seems to cover the differences quite well, and they go quite a bit beyond silver being a worse version than gold. https://goldsilver.com/blog/gold-vs-silver-the-5-differences-that-matter-most-to-investors/
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United States13132 Posts
On July 01 2021 23:36 LegalLord wrote:
On another note, does anyone have a good sense of how silver works? I put a pretty sizeable position in gold since I'm looking for a hedge against inflation that doesn't have the same downside potential as doubling down as absurdly overpriced US stocks. Silver is often bundled together with gold in being useful for that, but clearly behaves differently in the short and long term. I am mostly inclined to conclude that it's just a worse version of gold (which I mostly treat as "inflation-adjusted cash"), but given that it's definitely an important precious metal I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing about the mechanics of silver that anyone else knows about.
Any reason you're looking at Gold/Silver and not something like Bitcoin as a store of value? With gold crashing last week it may be the best time to buy it though.
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On July 02 2021 01:32 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2021 23:36 LegalLord wrote:
Far as brokers go, my primary requirements these days are that their core system is stable (i.e. won't get screwed out of my money), they are a real business with a phone number I can call if I need support, and they give me a wide range of asset classes that I can invest in. I am admittedly too wimpy to use margin so I don't really care about that. For IBKR I hear mostly mediocre things, but they seem to service a lot of countries (great for East Europe) and give good rates on margin. Good if that's your thing, I suppose, but not for me.
On another note, does anyone have a good sense of how silver works? I put a pretty sizeable position in gold since I'm looking for a hedge against inflation that doesn't have the same downside potential as doubling down as absurdly overpriced US stocks. Silver is often bundled together with gold in being useful for that, but clearly behaves differently in the short and long term. I am mostly inclined to conclude that it's just a worse version of gold (which I mostly treat as "inflation-adjusted cash"), but given that it's definitely an important precious metal I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing about the mechanics of silver that anyone else knows about. Not an expert, but this seems to cover the differences quite well, and they go quite a bit beyond silver being a worse version than gold. https://goldsilver.com/blog/gold-vs-silver-the-5-differences-that-matter-most-to-investors/
That looks like the standard talk, but to be honest it mostly just seems like a false equivalence to bundle gold and silver together. Gold is primarily a store of value that has a couple of key practical uses; silver is a rare metal that has important industrial uses and occasionally serves as a cheaper, and in my eyes lesser, version of gold. The point about short-term volatility is noted, but for gold I'd be looking at 10-100 year timeframes to see what it does. On the long-term, which is what you'd want for a store of value, silver really does look like just a bad version of gold.
Honestly, if I had to make my own evaluation of silver based on what I've seen, it seems like a weird hybrid of value-store and commodity. But gold is more efficient at storing value and there are better commodities out there, so I just don't see where silver has a place in an investment portfolio. I'm not really sure that "it just sucks" is a good answer though, given its historical significance, so I'd love to see more perspectives.
On July 02 2021 01:43 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 01 2021 23:36 LegalLord wrote:
On another note, does anyone have a good sense of how silver works? I put a pretty sizeable position in gold since I'm looking for a hedge against inflation that doesn't have the same downside potential as doubling down as absurdly overpriced US stocks. Silver is often bundled together with gold in being useful for that, but clearly behaves differently in the short and long term. I am mostly inclined to conclude that it's just a worse version of gold (which I mostly treat as "inflation-adjusted cash"), but given that it's definitely an important precious metal I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing about the mechanics of silver that anyone else knows about. Any reason you're looking at Gold/Silver and not something like Bitcoin as a store of value? With gold crashing last week it may be the best time to buy it though.
Not a fan of crypto. Having looked deeper into it, the only two practical uses of it that I've seen are as a volatile speculative investment and as a currency for criminal activity. It shows every sign of being rotten as a mainstream currency, that's for sure.
What I want is an asset class that adjusts for inflation, but also has protection from the downside potential of economic distortion from the knock-on effects of questionable monetary policy. Gold is clearly good at that - it has a long historical precedent, enough practical uses to anchor its price in reality, physical limitations on its quantity, and its place in just about every world treasury. Silver, meh. Crypto is none of that and most of the arguments for it boil down to "look how high that price goes!" So I went with gold for a sizeable enough piece of my portfolio to support a decent hedge.
Not great, not terrible so far, but I have been buying the recent dip in gold. Better than holding too much cash and stocks at current valuations frighten me.
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United States13132 Posts
On July 02 2021 02:09 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On July 02 2021 01:43 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:On July 01 2021 23:36 LegalLord wrote:
On another note, does anyone have a good sense of how silver works? I put a pretty sizeable position in gold since I'm looking for a hedge against inflation that doesn't have the same downside potential as doubling down as absurdly overpriced US stocks. Silver is often bundled together with gold in being useful for that, but clearly behaves differently in the short and long term. I am mostly inclined to conclude that it's just a worse version of gold (which I mostly treat as "inflation-adjusted cash"), but given that it's definitely an important precious metal I'm wondering if there's something I'm missing about the mechanics of silver that anyone else knows about. Any reason you're looking at Gold/Silver and not something like Bitcoin as a store of value? With gold crashing last week it may be the best time to buy it though. Not a fan of crypto. Having looked deeper into it, the only two practical uses of it that I've seen are as a volatile speculative investment and as a currency for criminal activity. It shows every sign of being rotten as a mainstream currency, that's for sure. What I want is an asset class that adjusts for inflation, but also has protection from the downside potential of economic distortion from the knock-on effects of questionable monetary policy. Gold is clearly good at that - it has a long historical precedent, enough practical uses to anchor its price in reality, physical limitations on its quantity, and its place in just about every world treasury. Silver, meh. Crypto is none of that and most of the arguments for it boil down to "look how high that price goes!" So I went with gold for a sizeable enough piece of my portfolio to support a decent hedge. Not great, not terrible so far, but I have been buying the recent dip in gold. Better than holding too much cash and stocks at current valuations frighten me.
I see it more as a diversification hedge personally. If I have some bitcoin, eth, and twenty others then hopefully one of them ends up being Amazon in the dot com bubble and makes up for all the enrons.
I think it is clear that block chain technology has a future. Just a matter of investing in the one that ends up doing something useful.
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Bitcoin / crypto is certainly a different asset class - could make sense to invest in a crypto index or best-in-class coin or something - but even a lot of its more honest supporters will admit that it's not very similar to gold in behavior or purpose. I know some people got rich off of it and there are some legitimate-sounding applications of the technology. I will note that I don't have much faith in its long-term usage because the core technology is hard to reconcile with how a global financial system has to work, and because unlike gold or any other traditonal value-store, there's no inherent reason why a coin is worth $X instead of <$X or $0.
I do find the concept of stablecoins interesting, and I do remember that the Fed gave it a nod of "it can have its place in financial markets." Seems useful for rare but large transfers of money between massive financial entities, assuming there can be a crypto that solves its volatility problem. But two other defining characteristics of crypto - computational complexity of executing a transaction and the public ledger of transactions - make it pretty awful for anything other than a few niche applications in financial markets.
I know that crypto discussions have a tendency to go in a stupid direction so I won't go much further into it than that, but to put it simply, it ain't my thing. Like most people, I wish I had bought it the first time I heard about it and hadn't sold it until it peaked, but now that we crossed that bridge I have no interest in it.
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I've been sweating my friend's investment into a penny stock called DPLS. He put in $8,000 when it was at 1 cent and now it's at 15 cents so he's up over $100k. Pretty crazy.
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I love throwing money into penny items, its a risk, but easily $100 or $1000 can take you a lot further in shares and returns if it does hit high numbers. I've made quite a few good trades and returns within the weed penny stocks. But thanks for the tip DPLS seems like some where I'll throw a few hundos when it dips.
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To me Penny stocks are confusing as hell, for example on E*TRADE you can't buy them at Market value, only on limit orders. Then after buying they don't show on your portfolio so you can't track etc.
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Even with all the DD, putting 4-figures into penny stocks is something I could never do. Though, Im perfectly content putting in a few hundred into something clean energy/battery based (if anyone knows of any? thatd be cool)
More than half my portfolio is in XELA and AUUD atm. I figured I might as well since I had to exit out of my largest long (NIO) today. Pretty interesting most of my returns are from "pump and dumps". All of my longs make up like 10% of my gains. Im still noobie at this but its fun.
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On July 08 2021 03:23 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
To me Penny stocks are confusing as hell, for example on E*TRADE you can't buy them at Market value, only on limit orders. Then after buying they don't show on your portfolio so you can't track etc.
?? I use Etrade and I see all my OTC stocks just fine. Also the market value thing i don't mind it, sometimes I'm able to get a buttload of shares cheaper than market.
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On July 08 2021 04:24 Emnjay808 wrote:
Even with all the DD, putting 4-figures into penny stocks is something I could never do. Though, Im perfectly content putting in a few hundred into something clean energy/battery based (if anyone knows of any? thatd be cool)
More than half my portfolio is in XELA and AUUD atm. I figured I might as well since I had to exit out of my largest long (NIO) today. Pretty interesting most of my returns are from "pump and dumps". All of my longs make up like 10% of my gains. Im still noobie at this but its fun.
Idk man, DD helps a lot with penny stocks. Some of these companies have been around forever, and did splits or just dipped a lot, and then all the sudden make huge increased and reverse splits that drive the price up like crazy. YCBD is my most recent penny stock win. I bought into the pennies early 2020, and now they're almost $3, with me selling a few at $4 mark.
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Hi, i basically trade for a living right now. Everything i do is in crypto, specifically defi
Most of the money i make is different forms of arbitrage. Not unreasonable to outperform BTC by hundreds of % doing this kind of stuff depending on your portfolio size
In terms of a crypto portfolio, i am 90% buy and hold ETH+BTC exposure, and the other 10% is just random gambling
Have some background in futures prop trading from old days
Happy to talk random stuff about it here
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Red number day for stocks yet thanks to $DPLS I'm in the green still lol
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On July 09 2021 00:49 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Red number day for stocks yet thanks to $DPLS I'm in the green still lol
Lol nice. Did u buy it after I mentioned it yesterday or did u have some already?
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On July 09 2021 03:40 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2021 00:49 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Red number day for stocks yet thanks to $DPLS I'm in the green still lol Lol nice. Did u buy it after I mentioned it yesterday or did u have some already?
I just bought cause it doesn't seem to want to dip in this market :D
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On July 08 2021 23:46 BrTarolg wrote:
Hi, i basically trade for a living right now. Everything i do is in crypto, specifically defi
Most of the money i make is different forms of arbitrage. Not unreasonable to outperform BTC by hundreds of % doing this kind of stuff depending on your portfolio size
In terms of a crypto portfolio, i am 90% buy and hold ETH+BTC exposure, and the other 10% is just random gambling
Have some background in futures prop trading from old days
Happy to talk random stuff about it here
Which coins do you recommend hodling ? mostly on the alt coins
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On July 09 2021 20:26 goody153 wrote:Show nested quote +On July 08 2021 23:46 BrTarolg wrote:
Hi, i basically trade for a living right now. Everything i do is in crypto, specifically defi
Most of the money i make is different forms of arbitrage. Not unreasonable to outperform BTC by hundreds of % doing this kind of stuff depending on your portfolio size
In terms of a crypto portfolio, i am 90% buy and hold ETH+BTC exposure, and the other 10% is just random gambling
Have some background in futures prop trading from old days
Happy to talk random stuff about it here Which coins do you recommend hodling ? mostly on the alt coins
in terms of alt coins? none of them
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EPT
