I hope you don’t mind my weighing in again in the comments. I really do appreciate all of the insight your readers have shared here in the comments about OptionsHouse and we are definitely listening. The latest one from Jumbo Jug is one I would like to address:

I consulted with our product team and we are unaware of any issues on our end that could be causing your friend’s browser to freeze; especially as frequently as once in an hour. This may be a problem with his connection or hardware, but anyone who has any technical issues or difficulty connecting is welcome to contact our customer service department at customerservice@optionshouse.com or call 877-653-2500 to see if there is anything we can do to assist with the troubleshooting process.

As far as confirmation emails are concerned, you’re correct; we do not automatically generate a confirmation email at the time of the trade, but we do send out an email after the close of the market to alert customers that a confirmation is in their OptionsHouse account message center. We send the actual confirmation to the account message center in order to keep the information secure for our customers. However, I did pass along your idea to the product team and they will definitely keep it in mind for any future enhancements to our current system.

The last scenario you outlined where you describe putting in an order for qty:50 options and seeing only qty:1 of those contracts execute. There is always the potential for this to happen in a market scenario, but our trading platform has a built-in feature that allows you to do an exchange look-up before you trade. This shows the bid, ask and size on every exchange at that given moment. After the trade, execution reports are also available for every fill posted to an OptionsHouse account. As a firm, we do not engage in filling any trades for a single contract in order to exact commissions for modifications.

I am happy to connect you, or your friend, with someone on our team that can address all your questions and concerns about OptionsHouse, or please feel free to contact customer service directly.

I hope this helps you and your friend as well as anyone else here considering an account at OptionsHouse.

Thank you,
Shannon Paul
Communications Manager
PEAK6 Online – Parent Company of OptionsHouse

Good things:
1. Charges low fee for options. They get 100 out of 100 Marks there.
2. Real time update of price .

Bad things:
1. Browser freeze on you once in an hour. You have to kill the browser and restart new browser.
2. There is no way you get confirmation about any order execution unless you are logged in and watching interactively. They will not send any confirmation e-mail. Looks scary to me here. To give an example, let us say you put an order and it is executed today, 2 days or few days later, there is no way you know it is executed. However, you get an e-mail that something happend in your account at the end of the day without specific trade information. That means if you are not logged in let us say the price goes up, OptionsHouse can sell your options and you do not even know. He is not saying they they are doing it or they will do it. But not providing e-mail confirmation makes me think so much.

Another example he gave was, let us say you put order for qty:50 options, once in while you see only qty:1 option getting executing (buy or sell). That means if you cancel the order you are paying $9.99 for one option. He does not know somebody really bought that contract or OptionsHouse is executing to make money.

That is the reason I did not open account until today. I told my friend to let me know when they provide e-mail confirmation to me of every executed trade.

There are more things like this he mentioned and he is not sure everything going great or not if you are logged in and watching all the time.

Hope this information helps other people decide whether to join OptionsHouse or not.

The only problem I have had with the platform was a case where I modified an open order on a trade that was partially filled, and got confused because I thought the platform was telling me that the new replacement order had been completely filled right away, when it actually hadn’t. I believe it was a rare technical glitch, but to make a long story short, after calling tech support and informing them about the problem I had experienced, they credited my account for the additional commission charge I had incurred from the confusion. You call that terrible customer service?

What’s more, by the end of this year, I heard that optionshouse is going to add more advanced order types (like one cancels other, one triggers other, etc.) which is really going to make my trading experience even better.

One last thing I wanted to mention: do you know how amazing it is to actually be able to buy 100 options contracts, for example, and then sell them 1 cent higher than you bought them for, and still manage to make a profit? Or how about getting into an options trade with 100 contracts that doesn’t go your way, and ending up having to sell the contracts at the same price you bought them for, but only losing $20 (the commissions) on the round trip deal? I don’t know of any other brokers who offer commissions low enough for those two conditions to be possible. In my opinion you’re losing money if you’re trading with anyone else.

1. In the first six months of 2009, Optionshouse routed less than 2% of its order flow to PEAK6
2. Orders went to the same people that serve Optionshouse’s competitors.
3. Of the orders that went through PEAK6, they went into exchange sponsored auctions where open bids can be placed and the orders were executed at better prices than NBBO for the broker.

I know it’s hard to believe when the guy works for Optionshouse, but it’s illegal for him to give false facts, not to mention that it’s illegal for them to get you a “worst than NBBO” price.