Effective 1st January Intrade is radically changing how it encourages trading

Intrade expects trading liquidity to improve dramatically with our radical new fee structure.

Trading and expiry fees have been removed entirely.

They are being replaced instead with a modest monthly “trading seat” fee of only US$4.99.

This fee will be charged on the first day of every month, beginning 1st January.

We have improved our software to handle higher volumes as we continuously emphasize the fair pricing of contracts between members on our platform.

Visual data display lets members detect contracts that interest them. With this new incentive to trade we expect to see more trading on these contracts with closer spreads.

Furthermore, we will make our application programmable interface (API)* freely available to all members.

We hope members will applaud these improvements by sharply increasing their use of the services we offer.

As always, your feedback is the best guide we have on the improvements we can implement.

Good fortunes trading from all at Intrade.

*The Intrade API is an interface to encourage interaction with our platform in a manner and method entirely under your control. The Intrade API allows anyone to develop widgets, apps, prediction methods, robots, and crawlers that allow you to read from, and write to, (i.e. make predictions) Intrade in a fully customizable manner.

beautiful. cheep fee. who can complain

without MM on the daily dow I don't see me staying.
and if I deposit 100$ and losing it.
is intrade will keep on charging me 5$?
and if not so why is it different from not playing month and keeping the 100$.
I think the fee should be aply only if you have open contract.

Somehow i can't see it being a good deal for intrade unless it can manage to attract thousands of new "subscribers"otherwise it won't be economically viable.In my opinion $5 monthly charge is a christmas present i wasn't expecting.

So its going to be a flat $4.99? This'll be great for the guy with $10,000 in his account (the fees will knock off a measly .05% of his balance) but terrible for the guy with $100 in his account (the fees will gobble up 5% of his balance).

Why not stagger it based on account size or trading activity?

One question for you...I imagine this is a very real hypothetical:

Trader Jim hasn't traded since 2009. His balance is $250. Will he start being charged $4.99 immediately and, over the course of two years, his balance be taken down to $0 even though he hasn't logged in and perhaps may not even be aware of the fee change?

maybe intrade see 5000 members nd think they will get 25,000$ every month, but the true is that most of us are not very active i think.

i agree with avivits suggestion that if you make no trades you shouldbt be charged. As well you can try something where if your fees will be less than 4.99 for the month, then you pay whatever your fees are, so if your fees are .50 cents you only pay 50 cents, but you if you go over the 4.99 that is your cap.

$60 a year is a lot... My brokerage account I can trade mutual funds for no transaction fees, no monthly fees.

jhtrico1850 -- that is a disingenuous comparison, especially since you are only including mutual funds.

I only have $500 in my account and most of it is tied up in the presidential elections, rep nom etc etc.

What happens if I have $0 cash available for trading and its all tied up? Will they just make me sell one of my contracts to give them the $5?

jhtrico1850 wrote:

$60 a year is a lot... My brokerage account I can trade mutual funds for no transaction fees, no monthly fees.

There may not be "transaction fees", but they ARE making a lot of money from your assets. (take it from a guy who works in the financial industry)

This is a horrible idea for people with only a few hundred dollars in intrade. I only do a few trades a week, and this $5 fee will eat any profits I might make. There should be some kind of tiering for people with less than some amount of money.

LiveAces wrote:

I only have $500 in my account and most of it is tied up in the presidential elections, rep nom etc etc.

What happens if I have $0 cash available for trading and its all tied up? Will they just make me sell one of my contracts to give them the $5?

most probably i would assume they would just debit your account. So if you had 0 cash it would show as negative 4.99, then when you sell something or deposit cash, it would be recovered that way, instead of forcing you to sell positions.

I was bracing myself for a somewhat larger fee, so I'm pleased. If Intrade has projected it can do well with this, then that's fine all around. I could still see how this might discourage people who are just starting out with some play money till they got the hang of it (it could eat them up over time), so some tiering might be worth thinking about.

It will be interesting to watch how this affects liquidity, especially at the extremes.

Good luck! Will keep mentioning Intrade when I comment on news sites and blogs, as I think it's great to draw new people to the site. Speaking of that, you folks really need to advertise more.

Domer wrote:

jhtrico1850 -- that is a disingenuous comparison, especially since you are only including mutual funds.

Mutual funds are all I own, so it's fair for me. I am aware they make the money elsewhere, with inflated "expense fees", but I prefer indirect expense fees that hit at the time of the transaction, compared to a forced monthly fee. I guess it depends on how much the fee is.