Online Options Trading Brokers

A prerequisite for starting this income-generating business is to open an account with one of the better Online Options Trading Brokers. What you are looking for is a broker that gives you a balance among these three criteria: Brokerage Stability, Excellent Service and Low Commissions. You’ll want to select a broker that’s been around for a while and offers other products and services you might like to use. You’ll want to find a broker that has an excellent reputation for customer service, is easy to contact, and ideally offers good options education material. Finally, you’ll want to minimize your commissions, but not to the point that you compromise stability and service, especially if you are just starting out.

I can recommend OptionsXpress and Fidelity Investments as your options brokerage. I use them both and am very happy with them. Options Express is an outstanding online broker for safe options trading for income. They have an excellent educational section, specialty order types to help protect your trade, and a reasonably low, straight-forward commission schedule, and a virtual trading platform where you can paper trade as you build up your skills. One tool they have that is exceptionally useful for the conservative option seller is their trade and probability calculator tool. I use it to find out-of-the-money options with less than a 15% chance of being hit. That really puts the edge on your side. Another useful aspect of OptionsXpress is that you can also trade futures options from the same account -something to think about adding to your income-generating arsenal at some point. Fidelity Investments also offers an outstanding set of tools for the option seller. They also have a wide variety of other investment products that might appeal to the general conservative investor.

There are several others out there that I’ve heard are good. These include Zecco, Options House, TradeKing, Think or Swim, ChoiceTrade and Interactive Brokers. TradeKing is particularly interesting if you expect to be called out a lot: they charge $4.99 per assignment. Check them out.





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