Matthew please explain OEC commissions

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1

Matthew,



When one clicks on "Change commission plan" and then clicks on the OEC schedule the "Commission and AutoTrade Fee" for futures is listed as $3.28 per contract.



My OEC statement shows commissions and auto trade fees, for example, of $4.50 for ES, $4.96 for Gold, $5.11 for EUR and $5.26 for the Cotton contract.



Where do you get the $3.28 figure from? Can you please explain the discrepancy. Are all the after commission graphs for OEC now wrong?



Thanks,

Karl

2

Matthew,



To clarify: The figures I quoted for commission and auto trading fees include clearing and all other fees, in other words the total fees a subscriber has to pay per traded contract. Did you by any chance miss to include those fees?



Karl

3

Hi, Karl:



To answer your questions:



You are correct: I did not include exchange fees or NFA fees in the commission numbers – just the posted per-trade commission rates on the various broker web sites. I am aware that in some cases – even after excluding exchange fees – commissions vary by the specific contract traded. In other cases the broker refuses to actually print a commission rate card on their web site (OEC, for example) – I guess to inspire dialogue with prospects who contact them asking for commission rates. For both these cases I just used a guesstimate of the broker commissions.



I do plan on re-attacking the problem in the next week or so, armed with much more specific broker-by-broker and contract-by-contract data, so if you have a detailed list of OEC commissions, itemized by contract, please send it to me via email. It would be extremely helpful. (If you do this, and it’s not too much trouble, it would also be good if you could break out commissions versus fees not controlled by the broker – e.g. exchange, NFA, etc.)



Thanks. I know the commission calculations are certainly not perfect, and I have received a lot of feedback about how to improve them (allow people to turn them off, for instance; or choose better “default” commission plans for each broker).



As always, we’ll iterate the site, bit by bit, and make it better.



Send me any data you can, and I will try to incorporate it. Thanks!



Matthew