ChoiceTrade fees explained

It's safe to say that ChoiceTrade's fees are low in general. They either don't charge a brokerage fee for things other brokers do charge for, or they only charge a small amount. This means that you can use ChoiceTrade even in case you trade frequently like multiple times a week or daily.

Here's a high level overview of ChoiceTrade's fees

Online brokerages in general charge much lower brokerage fees than traditional brokerages do - this is largely due to the fact that online brokerages' businesses can be much better scaled: From a purely technical standpoint it doesn't make that much of a difference for them if they have 100 or 5000 clients.

This is not to say however that they don't have any fees at all. They make money by charging you at various events for various rates. Usually you need to keep an eye on these 3 types of fees:

• Trading fees - these are brokerage fees that you pay when you actually do a trade, i.e. buying an Apple stock or an ETF. What you pay is either a commission, a spread or financing rate. Some brokers apply all of these.
  • A commission is either based on the traded volume or it is fixed.
  • A spread is the difference between the buy price and the sell price
  • Financing rate or overnight rate is charged when you hold your leveraged positions for more than one day.
• Non-trading fees. These occur related to some operations you make in your account, i.e. depositing money to your account, withdrawing money from it or not trading for an extended amount of time.

We compare ChoiceTrade fees with its closest competitors, TradeStation and Interactive Brokers.

ChoiceTrade's trading fees are low which makes it suitable for you even if you trade often (i.e. multiple times a week).

Let's break down the trading fees into the different asset classes available at ChoiceTrade.

Trading fees

ChoiceTrade's trading fees are low.

Stock fees and ETF fees

ChoiceTrade has low stock trading fees.

Options fees

ChoiceTrade's options fees are low.

Financing rates

ChoiceTrade financing rates are .

If you want to trade on margin and prefer to hold your positions long, financing costs can be significant.

When it comes to looking at all the non-trading fees ChoiceTrade is an expensive broker. This means that they tend to charge you a lot for non-trading related activities on your trading account, like withdrawal fee.

Non-trading fees include various brokerage fees and charges at ChoiceTrade that you pay not related to buying and selling assets. Among some others, typical non trading fees are withdrawal fee, deposit fee, inactivity fee and account fee.

Deposit fees are applied when you send money to your trading account from your bank account. Usually brokers don't charge money for that and ChoiceTrade is not different: you will see the exact same amount on your brokerage account that you sent by any of the deposit methods ChoiceTrade offers.

Unfortunately, quite like the majority of the online brokers we have reviewed ChoiceTrade does charge a withdrawal fee of $5 for the bank transfer. This means that you need to pay this amount of money when you transfer your money back to your bank account. It's up to you to decide whether this is a high amount or not as it's dependent mostly on the size of the transferred amount.

ChoiceTrade does apply an inactivity fee and it is $40 per quarter if less than 5 trades in the previous quarter for individual accounts, $50 per month for corporate accounts if less than 5 trades. This means that you need to be strategic about your trading activity to avoid getting charged after a longer time of no trade. The fact that ChoiceTrade charges an inactivity fee makes it less ideal for you if you are a buy and hold investor.

ChoiceTrade has high inactivity fee.

Read more about ChoiceTrade inactivity fee on their own site.