Active Traders looking to trade with cheapest commissions in the industry without compromising on customer service, market research and quality of trading tools should opt for Optionshouse. They have established themselves as a reliable discount broker amid difficult times of intensifying price wars and race for technological innovations in the brokerage industry.
It’s really amusing to see how most options traders’ Google about them to evaluate offerings of this ultra low-cost broker. You might have this notion that are only into options but that\'s not the case, they are equally present in stocks, ETF\'s, and bonds. Their website is user friendly and you can easily look for the information you want
For detailed information, browse through our detailed reviews below.
What Type of Accounts you can open with OptionsHouse?
Popular account types are the individual. joint account when going for a standard cash account with OptionsHouse. You may want to open a margin account with them if you are addicted to using leverage.
The list of all accounts that one can start with Optionshouse is:
- Individual Accounts
- Joint Tenants with Rights of Survivorship
- IRA Accounts Traditional IRA | SEP IRA | Roth IRA | Educational IRA
- Corporate, Partnerships and Trust Accounts: Corporate | Partnership | Sole Proprietorship | Investment Club | LLC | Trust |
- UTMA/UGMA Accounts: UTMA | UGMA
Optionshouse offers an impressive selection of investing products:
- Stocks
- Options
- Coporate Bonds
- US Treasuries
- Mutual Funds
OptionsHouse: Fees & Commissions
They are of the cheapest brokers with flat-fee commissions. One may even benefit from their flexible pricing structure that allows you to change the brokerage plan as your trading requirements change. For Stock Trades, OptionsHouse charges a flat fee of $3.95. If you trade less than 10 options contracts then choose 5 for $5 rate and your first five contracts will only cost $5 in commissions. Under this options commission pricing structure you will have to pay $1/contracts for more than 5 contracts. For Mutual Fund trades they charge $9.95. The best part is that the commission structure is designed around the way you trade, so it makes OptionsHouse a smarter choice for its innovative pricing approach. In a single order one OptionHouse allows you to trade 50,000 shares or 4,000 option contracts. Larger orders are billed as separate orders.
OptionsHouse Tools and Platform Performance
OptionsHouse uses a completely browser-based platform. The current version is 2.0 which is quite advanced and a beginner trader will take some time to learn. You can always opt for a practice account with virtual money to get used to the platform.
OptionsHouse has an award-winning platform for option traders as well as stock traders. It has been ranked best for options traders several times by Barron’s survey of top online brokerages. There are absolutely no doubts about the stability of this platform designed by traders at PEAK6 Investments. The platform can work on any browser and you can trade with almost any mobile device that can run browsers. They even allow after-hours trading.
- OptionsHouse Risk Viewer Tool: OptionsHouse created this risk viewing tool so that clients can easily understand and estimate the impact of potential risks their portfolio is prone to. This tool is quite flexible and one can analyze his positions and get an idea of market risk based on theoretical values.
- OptionsHouse Streaming Charts and News: These are the keys to making well-informed trade decisions. The best part is that OptionsHouse streams such data free of costs, but it requires a funded account. The data is customizable and you can even setup a workstation and view data separately on different monitors. One can add custom overlays to charts; these are helpful to technical traders. The combo of charting tool with streaming news lets you monitor the pulse of the market minute-by-minute.
- OptionsHouse Trade Generator:This tool is a game changer; this tool lets you find hundreds of option trades as per your pre set parameters. Scalpers would love using the trade generator. It’s a powerful tool, rather a mix of nine different tools which you can use to find opportunities that suit your criteria.
- OptionsHouse Call Spread Investigator:This tool makes it easy to scan equity options to identify call spreads with theoretically high returns. As a result of corporate reorganization some spreads get overly complicated. This tool filters out all such spreads.
- OptionsHouse Covered Call Investigator:This tool helps in identifying covered calls with theoretically higher returns. Even this tool filters out overly complicated covered calls. However, this tool does not consider the risk of being assigned on the call before its expiration, this can happen earlier to a large dividend payout.
- OptionsHouse Put Spread Investigator:Similar to call spread and covered call tools, the put spread investigator let you identify put spreads with higher theoretical returns. Similarly, it filters out complicated spreads.
- OptionsHouse Probability Calculator:This is a unique tool, probably the only one of its kind. This tool calculates the probability of a symbol hitting custom price points before a future date. You have to enter a symbol, price points and a date, and the probability calculator does the rest. This is really helpful while determining breakeven levels in an options strategy. You can even configure several other parameters with this calculator for better results, which include Implied Volatility (Index Wise), Interest Rate, Dividend Rate, Dividend Amount, Dividend Frequency, and a target date and target prices as mentioned above.
- OptionsHouse Profit and Loss (P&L) Calculator:Don’t go by the name, this isn’t any basic P&L calculator. This tool can help you with complex option strategies. You have to select the legs for the trade and an interactive profit and loss curve is displayed. With advanced slider controls you can adjust time to expiration and change in volatility and the curve will change in real time to give you a better picture of possible scenarios.
- OptionsHouse Stock Screener:Now track investments based on your liking as you can configure this tool to look for stocks in different ways. The broad range of stock selection data include:- Industry, Market Capitalization, Earnings Per Share, Price to Earnings Ratio, Price to Book Ratio, Percent change, Volume and many more.
- OptionsHouse Volatility Charts:These provide a good opportunity for traders to analyze volatility trends; you can even compare historic volatility with implied volatility. Such charts let you spot opportunities by spotting similar trends.
How good is their Customer Service and Support?
Nothing to boast about over here, but we can say that they meet industry wide standards and you won’t feel ignored in a trading emergency. OptionsHouse consistently delivers really good and wonderful phone support, offered from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. CT Monday through Friday. The live-chat option will take time and is a tedious process.
Education & Training for Traders
At OptionsHouse, educational webinars are conducted on a daily basis during the market hours to discuss the latest market developments. Complex options strategies are also discussed during the seminars. Our research team firmly believes that new traders should definitely take advantage of the learning opportunities provided by OptionsHouse and that the training provided is the best in the industry.
However OptionsHouse lacks in other kinds of education for traders such as ETFs, Stock Research etc. That is why our team gave a rating of 3 stars in education.
Miscellaneous information about OptionsHouse
OptionsHouse as low-cost discount broker is ideal for options traders. On the whole, we would say that OptionsHouse is an excellent choice in the discount brokerage space especially if you are more inclined towards trading options, as those rates are very hard to beat. The firm was rated 4 1/2 stars (highest rating) for Trade Experience and awarded an impressive third consecutive "Best for Options Traders" ranking in Barron's 2012 annual ranking of top online brokers..
Open account
12 November 2012
Their commission charge for options is less than half of what their competitors charge. Options House is one of the best choices if you are only interested in Options Trading.
03 January 2013
Eric, very well said. As our editor review points out, OptionsHouse is known for its cheap rates. Most traders I know they do research on another platform and do their trading on TD Ameritrade.
01 August 2010
Hey Mayt,
I didnt have that problem. Not sure what experience you had. You probably want to call their customer service. I agree they dont have the best trading experience but their rates are awesome and hence I hold an account with them and I have 3000$ there for occasional orders where I dont care about the speed. Just a way to save some bucks
07 July 2010
Oh god! I have been waiting for about 34 days to establish this ACH fund transfer deal. Week after week they put me on hold to review my application and then I hear the same answer " It has been solved and you will see a micro deposit in your account next week" .. I am just freaked out and might go with lighspeed or something else..really bad customer service
12 June 2010
Hey Nikkie,
Ditto, I am not a great fan of OptionsHouse either. Just like you, I have an account with them just because of their rates. IMHO that is their strategy I think. They don’t pay their designers and just hence keep the cost lower lol. Either way, its worth having an account with them
12 June 2010
OptionsHouse UI is not as friendly but I have an account with them coz they are so cheap. You get what you pay for. So if you don’t trade multiple times a day, you can easily pull it off with OptionsHouse
03 June 2010
No 1040 support with Gainskeeper or another tool. This makes it very difficult to track trades when it comes to tax time…. Their website doesn’t show margin equity used per position. (I was at TD Ameritrade and their site shows this much clearly and is more helpful).
16 March 2010
I started using OptionsHouse last month and their trading platform is little bit annoying in the beginning that it opens up and takes entire space. Since I had 100 free trades when I opened my account with OptionsHouse, I kept using it for couple weeks (and I actually made pretty good money because I almost operated like a day trader, did not care about brokerage fees ) After some continuous usage, I started to like OptionsHouse a lot.
Honestly speaking I really love their contextual menu options when you can right click and issue commands to the system. I recently purchased several stocks using my optionshouse account without any problem.
There is a lot of bad information out there regarding brokers. Reading through all the brokerage account reviews, I got so fed up that I just opened up a bunch of accounts and tried them all out. When I tried out the services myself I had some interesting findings.
Regarding trading platform quality, IMHO OptionsHouse is little bit on the cheap side in the sense that their platform is not as pretty looking as others such as Zecco or TD Ameritrade or likewise. First of all TD Ameritrade charges you freaking 10$ per trade. If I started with TD Ameritrade, I would have paid 1,000$ to them just for learning how to trade. With OptionsHouse I had the luxury to try out and learn my way through stumbling. Note that for some brokers, you will get the best experience with their desktop application, while with others, you’ll get a better experience via trading through the web.
TD Ameritrade has a problem in how they handle limit orders and also they have screwed their customers in several instances which leads me to not recommend the service.
When you are doing Options Trading cost per contract is very important to you. After OptionsHouse, the cheapest per contract fee I have seen is Zecco at 50 cents. The typical retail trader is not trading 1000 contracts at a time. For those that are, OptionsHouse is obviously the best choice. Don’t forget about option exercise and assignment fees, which can vary greatly. Zecco is at $4.50 while OptionsHouse is at $5. TD will run you $19.95!
Best discount brokers for stock and options trader is TradeKing and OptionsHouse. If you just trade stocks, add Zecco to that list.
24 February 2010
Is this a scam?
04 November 2009
Excellent customer service . Low rates. I am really happy with Options House