# of trades in a quarter?

So just a general question:

What would be a typical number of trades you make in a quarter?

I ask this because scotia iTrade requires 30 trades per quarter to get rid of the $19.99 commission and $0.02 per share above 1000 shares commission.

If I were to trade any company above 1000 share right now, after all is said and done it would cost me $40 + $0.04 per share to buy and sell.....not very good.

Alternatly I could have $50K in my account but that won't be happening any time soon.


I'm pretty sure i will miss 30 trades this quarter (ending dec 31) but I think I can make it next quarter.

This really limits me in penny stock tradeing as I need the stock to go up at least 0.04 just to clear some of my commission costs.

I making a little over 30 trades a quarter I think, but I sell early and often. There are less and less options for small portfolio traders. I think I found a good one with the CIBC trade package, but they have now discontinued that.

With a small portfolio, you are going to be sacrificing either size of investment (which makes it hard to make enough money to beat the commission), or frequency of trades (larger trades will eat up all of your cash quickly and you will never make 30 trades per quarter that way).

30 trades per quarter or $50-100k balance seems to be pretty standard in order to get cheap commissions unless you are willing to go with one of the discount brokerages outside of the big 5 banks. (Questrade, Interactive Brokers, etc...). I strongly recommend you look into this as a posibility (mostly because I am curious to hear about how these other platforms perform).