As I type this post, I’m watching BNN, which is the case when I type out approximately 92% of my stuff. The other 8% is the best of the crap churned out by the million monkeys I have typing at a million laptops. As an aside, does anyone know a good place to buy a whole bunch of bananas? The monkeys are eating each other’s poo for now, but we all know that isn’t sustainable.
Anyway, an online brokerage that advertises a lot on BNN is Interactive Brokers. IB is definitely targeting high frequency traders, but I often wonder why it isn’t more popular with normal investors. The costs are outstanding. If you were to buy 100 shares of Research in Motion, you would pay all of a dollar in trading commissions. Trades on U.S. exchanges are even cheaper, checking in at a whole 0.5 cents per share, with a minimum cost of $1.00. They also give an investor access to all sorts of different European and Asian exchanges. Want to buy shares directly from Japan? That’ll cost you a whole 0.8% of the value of your trade.
Costs have come down significantly over the years, but IB is still significantly cheaper than all the others. And yet, I see nary a mention of IB when people discuss online brokerages. Questrade charges $4.99 for a minimum trade, which is pretty much the maximum you’d pay at IB.
I don’t get why they’re not more popular. Maybe it’s because they market themselves to day traders, rather than personal finance bloggers?
Song I Like And Therefore You Should Too
I’m impressed I still have readers after suggesting Carly Rae last week. I may have just taken the last 4 minutes to watch that video again. Let’s move on.
Yeah, the German subtitles on the lyrics are strange. It’s Johnny Cash. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t care for Germans.
Simpsons Quote
Mr. Burns: So, another Friday is upon us. What will you be doing, Smithers? Something gay, no doubt!
Smithers: Wha…? What?!
Mr. Burns: You know. Light-hearted, fancy-free. “Mothers, lock up your daughters! Smithers is on the town!”
Smithers: Exactly, sir.
Gambling Is Fun
I went 1-1-1 last week, which has to be the most vanilla week since that week I ate nothing but vanilla ice cream and drank nothing but vanilla extract. That was a good week.
I’m going to take the San Francisco Homos Giants to beat San Diego, because San Diego is worse than herpes. (I mean the baseball team, not the city. San Diego is a nice place) I’m also going to take Texas to beat Tampa Bay, because one of those teams is really good. Finally, I’m going to take W. Brett Wilson’s Nashville Predators to bounce back against Phoenix. Nashville dominated game 1, and they’re generally a better team than Phoenix.
Overall record: 33-45-3
A Post You Might Have Missed
I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I just finally got Google Analytics set up on my blog. So now, I know exactly which posts you’re all spending your time on. Only I could make this creepy.
Apparently I hate college. It probably has to do with all those times I tried to pick up college girls, but they were looking for someone a little more mature than me, like college guys. Anyway, go check out the case against college. It would be delightfully ironic if you read it during class at college.
The More You Know
Can you literally feel your IQ go up after you read this section? Considering the rest of my blog, it probably just returns your IQ to where it was before you showed up.
“Du hast“ German, “You have”, whose title is a play on the homophones ”hast” and “hasst” (“have” and “hate”), is a song by German industrial metal band Rammstein. It was released as the second single from their second album Sehnsucht (1997). It has appeared on numerous soundtracks for films, most notably The Matrix: Music from the Motion Picture, and is featured in the music video games Guitar Hero 5 and Rock Band 3.
The main guitar riff of the song shows a strong resemblance to Ministry’s song “Just One Fix”; the band themselves have cited Ministry as one of their primary influences.
Dirty Word In Words With Friends
I played ‘cock’ when playing with my buddy Dale. He is in Vegas this week, yet is using his time to play Words with Friends rather than go out and find a hooker.
If you want to play me, my user is ‘nelsmi’. You know it’ll make all your non-sexual dreams come true. (And even some of the sexual ones)
Babe Loosely Related To Finance
I think I’m going to keep posting girls from Facebook until said company actually goes public. I’ve found enough pictures that I can wait for years.
I hate bathroom mirror pics too, but you gotta admit she’s worth it. I’m almost tempted to join Facebook again.
Related plug: like Financial Uproar on Facebook. It’ll literally be better than sex with the above girl. (Note: not really)
Time For Links
I’m going to give the coveted top spot to Paula from Afford Anything, who uses science to determine dollar cost averaging kind of sucks. Most people don’t have giant sums of money sitting around, so they have no choice but to DCA. Still, good post.
Darwin’s Money is getting a vasectomy. He makes some points about money in the process of making us all uncomfortable.
For some reason, I’m endlessly fascinated by ethics and money. I’ve wrote about it a few times. I’ve read about it a few more. What causes people to do bad things for money? Dave over at Canadian Dream takes a look at the issue.
My internet sugar mama, Kathryn, points out how it’s crappy to be a renter in New York City these days. This situation is happening all across the U.S., because people just aren’t buying houses.
Control Your Cash named the April retard of the month. Seeing the word retard made me cry, but then I scrolled back up to the babe of the week, and my tears turned into a boner.
That’s all I got this week. Step up your game for next week, blogosphere.
Carnivals
I gotta pee.
Have a good week everyone.
Count me in as an Interactive Brokers user. I think the reason it’s less popular is its very high initial deposit. It’s not a Sharebuilder-type site where you can start with $25. I think the minimum is like $10,000. If you’re under 21, though, you can open an IB account with $3,000.
Commissions aren’t everything, though. There’s an activity fee minimum – you have to generate a certain amount of commissions for IB. It’s only $3 for people under 25, $10 for everyone else. Market data fees are something like $10 a month for non-professional equities.
Either way, if you add to your portfolio monthly, and you own and buy into several different securities, you’ll find IB to be WAAAAY cheaper than most other brokers. If you bought 100 shares of 10 different stocks each month you’d pay only $10 ($1 min. per trade, or .005 cents per share) in trading commissions plus $10 in data fees, or $2 a trade. You can’t beat that anywhere else.
Look at IB’s margin rates, too. Extremely low…right now IB provides margin at a 1.64% rate on US Dollars. Canadians score margin at just under 2.5% in CAD. There’s no comparison on margin with other brokers.
The reason Interactive Brokers is not as popular here is that they don’t offer RRSP, RRIF, RESP or TFSA accounts.