Monday, July 14, 2008

TradingDirect Offers The Best Margin Rates For Investors

Last November I wrote a post about how Fidelity offers a low margin rate for wealthy investors. As of today, July 14, 2008, the lowest margin rate provided by Fidelity is 4.00%. An investor would need to maintain a debit balance of at least $500,000 in order to receive this low margin rate.

Although the Fidelity margin rate is quite low, I recently discovered that TradingDirect offers a far lower margin rate. TradingDirect offers a margin rate as low as 2.75% for debite balances of over $1,000,000. Here is a chart showing the TradingDirect margin rates as of today:

2 comments:

VJ said...

The best broker for lowest margin
rate is InteractiveBrokers.com

http://individuals.interactivebrokers.com/en/accounts/fees/interest.php?ib_entity=llc

3.53% as of 7/18/2008

OnlineBrokerReview said...

Fidelity is now down to 3.75% for margin loan balances in excess of $500,000. They have terrible rates at lower balance levels though.

I have not tried out TradingDirect or InteractiveBrokers. From the ones I have tried (12 in total) TradeKing generally offers the best rates followed by E*TRADE and SogoTrade.

Check out the full comparison table I put together at http://onlinebrokerreview.blogspot.com/2009/02/margin-rates.html