Id venture robinhood is getting a little too much credit here.

The order this happened in was Interactive Brokers, Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Etrade. They were obviously all prepared to do it in the event one of them went for it. Interactive Brokers did this more to give themselves a competitive edge over Schwab, TDA, and ETrade. That lasted about a day.

I don't think so. None of these brokers would have gone down this path without the pressure that zero fee brokers have been bringing. It was easy to call that ETrade was cornered to follow after Schwab announced last week [0]. And like I mentioned in another comment: just because Schwab and ETrade have better tooling and many more features that doesn't always matter for some. I still use tools outside of ETrade and for certain trades will continue to run them through Robinhood. Now there's less incentive though, which is great for me as the consumer.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21142786

It was a race to the bottom, it may have taken longer, but they all would have been shaving a dollar off at a time till somebody hit zero.

Kinda sucks that IB started a whole new (gimped) service for this. I want my TWS and API access, why can't they let me choose whether I want to pay commissions or let them sell my order flow and do the trades for free?

if it makes you feel better, their API is text based and doesnt use message delimiters, so update TWS with great care, because a single new character off in any message will break your entire stream of data, order execution(and especially combo) entries, etc..

They also have some of the worst real time market data available (intraday), absolutely horrendous historical market data request rate limiting and more. Great brokerage, but if you're interested in API for more than orders I recommend other services for realtime data

Who do you recommend for an API for more than orders? Just yesterday I was looking at IBs data streams to figure out if they give me what I need without hitting rate limits.

depends - if you're doing aggressive intraday trading based on realtime data (tick or so), i can recommend many depending on need and cost, email me for details. As someone who used to trade for a living with a technical bent, Im passionate about it

if you just need reliable daily without 1440 minute bars going wack IB is probably ok

The first to offer (limited) free trades was Zecco, which later became TradeKing.

I think RobinHood was the first to sell the rights to trade against their users, though.

Discussed a couple day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21136348

It was Interactive Brokers that forced Schwab's hand.

And TDAmeritrade.

Anybody have a Charles Schwab account in the UK? I've been looking for a low fee brokerage who offer a business account in the UK. So far only IB seems to tick the box.