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Total posts in this thread: 5 |
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charles123
Advanced Member
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I currently use IB for my IRA. I was wondering if anyone uses FOLIOFN. If so how would you say their executions are? I know they execute in "windows". There is not much transparency there, but do the prices you get on trade execution seem reasonable? |
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kevinschlimgen
Advanced Member
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I have one of my accounts with them. There executions seem reasonable. I rarely use stop loss orders with this account--I have noticed spikes down picking off my stop loss order then immediately reverting to the average trading range--leaving me with the lowest price of the day. The web based trading is slow and cumbersome--if you plan to make many trades I would use something else. |
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KAR
Advanced Member
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I use several brokers incluidng both IB and FolioFn. Each one has an advantage. IB no doubt gives better control of trades and for buying a lot of the smaller stocks. Although I don't find IB is so great for OTC/pink sheets. I think others such as Scottrade or others are better for those. Trading the small microcaps at IB was hit or miss last year when I was trying that. I found at IB that the smaller, low liquidity pink sheet stocks never traded, but at Scottrade they just went through. So I think IB is only intersted in larger liquidity stocks. FFn is not good for pink sheets or microcaps and is not good for short-term (same day) trading. But for many other things including to build a well-rounded portfolio and to complement and fill out what mutual funds don't cover so well, I havn't found a better place to be. For one rather reasonable annual fee, FFn excels for being able to buy ETF's at no transaction fee and many closed-end funds at NTF and a tremndous number of Tier 1 stocks that have no transaction fee. And price is not so bad for buying the non-tier1 securities. They add new ETF's on a fairly timely basis. Their support is excellent. They have also changed their pricing structure so now it is just excelllent to make themselves much more campatible with rebalancing. I also like how I can set up a trade on a weekend or in early morning and then the window trade gets executed at about 11 EST which as has been discussed here previously in this forum is a not bad time for a trade to take place (although it is not at exactly the time of the P123 open price of course). It is also to import the transactions at end of year into Turbotax, which for using P123 strategies that trade a lot is important factor to me due to the time consuming nature that preparing taxes can end up be without this capabilty. And that is also just generally a good thing about FFn...it is very fee friendly to P123 type strategies that get balanced on a weekly or monthly basis...e.g. the yearly fee covers the cost of all those trades. So as you can tell, I like FFn a lot. I would be interested if others have suggestions about other best places to make pink sheet trades...including many foreign companies that trade on the pink sheets. |
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synchro
Advanced Member
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KAR, I used to be a foliofn customer until 2005, when i finally gave up convincing them to implement Quicken and MS/Money direct downloads. I heard they finally implemented them recently, was wondering if anyone has experience with that functionality. By coincidence, I have been contemplating going backt to foliofn, but was wondering about their viability. Anyway has any idea how many customers they have? How can they make money charging $30/month flat fee? |
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KAR
Advanced Member
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Hi, Yes, FFn now has Quicken Download. It is the .qfx type which is needed for the most recent few year versions of Quicken since the .qif format is no longer supported. The Quicken download itself is quite simple from FFn. Just as an aside, I have noticed it takes Quicken a while to process transaction imports that involve a lot of transactions...I am thinking that Quicken's db may not scale well to large # of transactions, so I am actually looking for an alternative tool to Quicken to track my portfolio. ---------------------------------------- [Edit 1 times, last edit by KAR at Apr 7, 2008 11:19:05 PM] |
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