OptionsHouse Account Minimum

I opened an OptionsHouse brokerage account back in June (check out my OptionsHouse review and stock trading experience for details about the broker). The reason for getting yet another brokerage account, I have plenty of accounts already, was that the commission for stock trading charged by OptionsHouse is very low. At $2.95 per trade, OptionsHouse beats many other brokers easily.

While trading with OptionsHouse is cheap, I wasn’t very happy when I discovered that I have to leave $100 in my account, the money that the broker said is to cover commission cost for high-volume traders. But for me, who has a cash account, that doesn’t make any sense. I complained to the broker and eventually in August Opt ionsHouse decided to eliminate the requirement of having $100 in the account. But at that time $100 requirement is still listed on their website which, as far as I can tell, will sure cause confusions among investors. Now I am glad to see that OptionsHouse has finally cleared up the issue with an updated web page with the following information about the account minimum (you can find the updated information on their FAQ page):

Do I need to maintain a minimum account balance?

There is no minimum account balance. The minimum account balance is not the same as the minimum initial funding size. The minimum initial funding size is $1,000 for a cash account and $2,000 for a margin account.

So though the $1,000 account minimum is higher than other brokers such as TradeKing and Scottrade, at least you can invest every dollar you have in the account If you are interested in getting an OptionsHouse account, you can take advantage of a few promotions currently going on. For example, if you transfer your account from other brokers, you can get reimbursed for up to $100 charged by other brokers (though you don’t pay any fee to open an account with a broker, you will usually be charged a fee, such as $50, when moving your account out to another broker).