What are NSCC illiquid charges?
NSCC illiquid charges are charges that apply to the trading of low-priced over-the counter (OTC) securities with low volumes. Open net buy quantity represents the total unsettled share amount per stock at any given time during a 3-day settlement cycle. Open net buy quantity must be less than 5,000,000 shares per stock for your entire firm Basically, you can't hold a long position of more than 5 million shares in an illiquid OTC stock without facing a fee. You'll still be assessed this fee if you accumulate a long position of this size by breaking your purchase up into multiple transactions. Open net sell quantity represents the total unsettled share amount per stock at any given time during a 3-day settlement cycle. Open net sell quantity must be less than 10% percent of the 20-day average volume If you attempt to sell a number of shares greater than 10% of the stock's average volume over the last 20 days, you'll also be assessed a fee. The first link I included above is just an example, but it makes the important point: you may still be assessed a fee for trading OTC stocks even if your account doesn't meet the criteria because these restrictions are applied at the level of the clearing firm, not the individual client.  This means that if other investors with your broker, or even at another broker that happens to use the same clearing firm, purchase more than 5 million shares in an individual OTC stock at the same time, all of your accounts may face fees, even though individually, you don't exceed the limits. Technically, these fees are assessed to the clearing firm, not the individual investor, but usually the clearing firm will pass the fees along to the broker (and possibly add other charges as well), and the broker will charge a fee to the individual account(s) that triggered the restriction. Also, remember that when buying OTC/pink sheet stocks, your ability to buy or sell is also contingent on finding someone else to buy from/sell to. If you purchase 10,000 shares one day and attempt to sell them sometime in the future, but there aren't enough buyers to buy all 10,000 from you, you might not be able to complete your order at the desired price, or even at all.
You can report the violation to the payment network (i.e., Mastercard or Visa).  For instance here is a report form for Visa and here is one for MasterCard.  I just found those by googling; there are no doubt other ways of contacting the companies. Needless to say, you shouldn't expect that this will result in an immediate hammer of justice being brought down on the merchant.  Given the presence of large-scale fraud schemes, it's unlikely Visa is going to come after every little corner store owner who charges a naughty 50-cent surcharge.  It is also unlikely that threatening to do this will scare the merchant enough to get them to drop the fee on your individual transaction.  (Many times the cashier will be someone who has no idea how the process actually works, and won't even understand the threat.)  However, this is the real solution in that it allows the payment networks to track these violations, and (at least in theory) they could come after the merchant if they notice a lot of violations. E*Trade offers banking services, and will provide you with a security token free if you have sufficient assets there ($50,000). Otherwise they'll charge you a $25 fee. was getting blood drawn for two doctors so multiple vials. technician says one test is mis-coded on the doctor's order and so I'd have to pay...**pay $563** or not have the test done  so I was giving seven vials, now six.  takes about 15 seconds to take the 7th and a machine does the analysis  ...hmmmm Wow, I had never heard of this before but I looked into it a bit and Mikey was spot on. It seems that if you don't pay attention to the fine print when making credit card purchases (as most of us tend to skip) many companies have stipulations that allow continued charges if they are recurring fees (monthly, yearly, etc.) even after you have cancelled the card. "Its a broker fee, not something charged by the reorganizing company. E*Trade charge $20, TD Ameritrade charge $38. As with any other bank fee - shop around. If you know the company is going to do a split, and this fee is of a significant amount for you - move your account to a different broker. It may be that some portion of the fee is shared by the broker with the shares managing services provider of the reorgonizing company, don't know for sure. But you're charged by your broker. Note that the fees differ for voluntary and involuntary reorganizations, and also by your stand with the broker - some don't charge their ""premier"" customers." You're 100% correct here. This is without a doubt on me. But it's still absurd do to me making a mistake about one large transaction bringing my balance negative, every small transaction past it is getting hit with a $35 dollar charge. Multiple transactions that a few dollars become an almost $50 dollar purchase a pop. They're making a killing off of people trying to make a living. "An order is your command to the broker to, say, ""sell 100 shares of AAPL"". An executed order (or partially executed order) is when all (or some) of that command is successfully completed. A transaction is an actual exchange of shares for money, and there may be one or more transactions per executed order.  For example, the broker might perform all of the following 5 transactions in order to do what you asked: On the other hand, if the broker cannot execute your order, then 0 transactions have taken place. The fee schedule you quote is saying that no matter how many transactions the broker has to perform in order to fill your order -- and no matter what the share prices are -- they're only going to charge you $0.005 per share ($0.50 in this example of 100 shares), subject to certain limits. However, as it says at the top of the page you linked, Our Fixed pricing for stocks, ETFs (Exchange Traded Products, or ETPs) and warrants charges a fixed amount per share or a set percent of trade value, and includes all IB commissions, exchange and most regulatory fees with the exception of the transaction fees, which are passed through on all stock sales. certain transaction fees are passed through to the client.  The transaction fee you included above is the SEC fee on sales.  Many (but not all) transaction fees DO depend on the prices of the shares involved; as a result they cannot be called ""fixed"" fees. For example, if you sell 100 shares of AAPL at $150 each, But if you sell 100 shares of AMZN at $940 each, So the broker will charge you the same $0.50 on either of those orders, but the SEC will charge you more for the expensive AMZN shares than for the cheaper AAPL shares. The reason this specific SEC fee mentions aggregate sales rather than trade value is because this particular SEC fee applies only to the seller and not to the buyer.  So they could have written aggregate trade value, but they probably wanted to highlight to the reader that the fee is only charged on sells." The SIPC would protect individual investors up to $500K for securities & cash, with a max of $250K for cash. One would receive all securities that are already in your name or in the process.   In case client money was diverted to company trades, then SIPC will investigate and try to find out how much money belonged to each customer. It would determine this on various inputs including your transaction records like money to transferred to MF Global, internal records, amongst other things. More information in the SIPC bulletin: http://www.sipc.org/Media/NewsReleases/release31Oct2011.aspx The best way to invest 50k Indian rupees is in a 5 Year NSC(National Saving Certificate which can be obtained at the Post Office) yielding interest 8.1% p.a. (at present), which is more than the effective FDR interest rate offered by any bank in India. Investment in an NSC also permits a deduction u/s 80C of the Income Tax Act, 1961. So, investing in an NSC will save tax and get a higher return/benefit for your investment. All openly traded securities must be registered with the SEC and setup with clearing agents.  This is a costly process. The cost to provide an electronic market for a specific security is negligible.  That is why the exchange fees per electronic trade are so small per security.  It is so small in fact that exchanges compensate price makers partially at the expense of price takers, that exchanges partially give some portion of the overall fee to those that can help provide liquidity. The cost to provide an open outcry market for a specific security are somewhat onerous, but they are initiated before a security has any continual liquidity to provide a market for large trades, especially for futures. Every individual option contract must be registered and setup for clearing. Aside from the cost to setup each contract, expiration and strike intervals are limited by regulation.  For an extremely liquid security like SPY, contracts could be offered for daily expiration and penny strike intervals, but they are currently forbidden. IESC has a one-time, non-repeatable event in its operating income stream.  It magnifies operating income by about a factor of five.  It impacts both the numerator and the denominator.  Without knowing exactly how the adjustments are made it would take too much work for me to calculate it exactly, but I did get close to their number using a relatively crude adjustment rule. Basically, Yahoo is excluding one-time events from its definitions since, although they are classified as operating events, they distort the financial record.  I teach securities analysis and have done it as a profession.  If I had to choose between Yahoo and Marketwatch, at least for this security, I would clearly choose Yahoo. I'm an Australian who just got back from a trip to Malaysia for two weeks over the New Year, so this feels a bit like dejavu! I set up a 28 Degrees credit card (my first ever!) because of their low exchange rate and lack of fees on credit card transactions. People say it's the best card for travel and I was ready for it. However, since Malaysia is largely a cash economy (especially in the non-city areas), I found myself mostly just withdrawing money from my credit card and thus getting hit with a cash advance fee ($4) and instant application of the high interest rate (22%) on the money. Since I was there already and had no other alternatives, I made five withdrawals over the two weeks and ended up paying about $21 in fees. Not great! But last time I travelled I had a Commonwealth Bank Travel Money Card (not a great idea), and if I'd used that instead on this trip and given up fees for a higher exchange rate, I would have been charged an extra $60! Presumably my Commonwealth debit card would have been the same. This isn't even including mandatory ATM fees. If I've learned anything from this experience and these envelope calculations I'm doing now, it's these: Depends how you're doing the math.  The actual damage done so far is zero or near zero.  You're valuing potential damage.  If your concern is fixing the error then the damage wouldn't be monetary - it'd be credit repair in the case of a problem. TL;DR.: Because eventually the CC issuer will pass the fraud bill to the customer, in the form of increased fees and/or taxes. Even with no liability in the case of fraud, the customer should put effort into security measures with their card. The expense from fraud may be the sole burden of the credit issuer / bank as per Ben Miller's answer, but this expense will someday find its way into the customer's pockets: Disclosure, i work at a bank. A banks' best ability probably is risk management. The ones that were bad at this probably went under in the last four decades. With regulations such as SOx, Basilea, and others, it is impossible for a bank to neglect risk management. Every expense, including operational losses, a bank incurs will reflect in increased fees / interest rates for the customers. So in the case of a sharp raise of credit card fraud, the banks will soon take measures to reduce these losses. That may mean canceling the cards of high-risk groups of customers, increasing fees or interest. A particular customer that is often the target of fraud (way more than the average for that customer's demographic) will probably see his card not renewed or even cancelled, or his limits decreased and/or rates/fees going up. Many states have a simple method for assessing income tax on nonresidents.  If you have $X income in State A where you claim nonresident status and  $Y income overall, then you owe State A a fraction (X/Y) of the income  tax that would have been due on $Y income had you been a resident of State A.  In other words, compute the state income tax on $Y as per State A rules, and send us (X/Y) of that amount.  If you are a resident of State B, then State B  will tax you on $Y but give you some credit for taxes paid to State A. Thus, you might be required to file a State A income tax return regardless of how small $X is.  As a practical matter, many commercial real-estate  investments are set up as limited partnerships in which most of the annual taxable income is a small amount of portfolio income (usually interest income that you report on Schedule B of Form 1040), and the annual  bottom line is lots of passive losses which the limited partners report (but do not get to deduct) on the Federal return.  As a result, State A is unlikely to come after you for the tax on, say, $100 of interest income each year because it will cost them more to go after you than they will  recover from you. But, when the real estate is sold, there will (hopefully) be a big capital gain, most of which  will be sheltered from Federal tax since the passive losses finally get  to be deducted.  At this point, State A is not only owed a lot of money (it knows nothing of your passive losses etc) but, after it processes the income tax return that you filed for that year, it will likely demand that you file income tax returns for previous years as well.