If I buy 4 can I have 4 billion?

Big news RNS for XEL today, basically more than doubled their expectations of volume for oil drilling:

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/reserves-assessment-on-the-bentley-field-tsx-xel-1775895.htm

Hopefully SP will have shot through the roof by the end of today.

I did. But I hated them. Didn't really trust them. They were good for trading small QTY of shares tho as they price per share and not for a trade. So 2 apple would be way cheaper with them. But then conversely if you bought 10000000 of a sh*t penny you're paying a lot more.

I use etrade in the US, have a TD account in the US too, and cap spreads + HL here.

Was thinking about TD too (well TOS really but TD now own them) - the thing with IB was that I liked the idea of having a whole range of products available though I've read some very mixed reviews about their customer service which I'm not sure is just because they've got a big client base and perhaps aren't engaging in any hand holding with inexperienced clients or because they're just generally a bit patchy with picking up the phone and resolving genuine issues. Did you ever have to contact them via phone regarding anything?
The smart routing bit put me off too - they don't really advertise their options market making operation (timber hill) on the website but I do wonder if another use of smart routing thing isn't just to match two clients (get them both a better price and dodge any clearing/exchange fees) or get the best price for clients across diff venues but also whether its used to channel orders to any of their market makers needing to hedge deltas as and when required. The other thing is that if you did end up looking at options strategies then you could end up in the situation where you're taking positions which aren't beneficial to them and its generally a good idea IMO to avoid conflicts of interest.

Re: spread betting- my opinion on it is just that it is OK if you want to take a directional punt over the course of  say a day or two

If you're looking at a short intra day time frame and trading futures spreads then the costs are way too high - you *have* to cross the spread for a start... no getting a good queue position and buying at the bid etc...
(there are plenty of other issues unique to SB firms too tbh... which are a result of the inherent conflicts of interest involved in running a parallel market)

UK brokers are either expensive or are arcade type set ups aimed at people doing this full time and so expect rather high volume (plus they've got their own agendas re: how they load on software costs, wanting a % cut of PnL (typically 10%)for allowing greater leverage. US FCMs are happy to offer lower than exchange margins as standard and have fairly reasonable RT costs even if not doing tens of thousands of RTs a month.

I'd also like to try automating a few tools and be able to pull some data into R so some sort of API or FIX connection is going to be required.

its a big cost across a short time frame irrespective of clip size... its not necessarily anything to do with doing huge volume either... it can be a big cost simply trading 1 lot.

Am on the train now so can't give a detailed example but essentially the Pnl per round turn for what I'd be doing is less than the value of a full tick so adding a spread of 1 tick means I'd lose money.

For a simple example consider a small scalper trading 1 lot if we assume he enters or exits via limit orders 50% of the time then he's essentially not paying the half tick spread. Say he does 50 round turns across the course of a day - we'll be generous and assume £2 per rt - placing the same number of bets at an SB firm costs £8 extra per trade... 50 trades across the day and that's £400 more he's got to make.

No I'd want to be spreading like I said before - the scalping example was just an example. Point is costs are too high.