So my portfolio was down about 300 dollars last week. The most troubling part of the drop was that I should have only been down 200 but after looking more closely at my options, I realized that I never had a much money as I once thought. First off, Sharebuilder seems to make you sell options at the lowest price (the "Bid" price) and buy them at the top dollar (the "Ask" price). So not only are you overpaying for options but when it says your option is worth X amount of dollars, it is saying what the Ask price is, but that is less (sometimes significantly less) than what you can actually sell the option for.

The other issue is the reason that I'm starting to take my money out of sharebuilder. There quotes for options are ridiculously slow to update. I get that they aren't real time quotes but they only update the prices once a day and even then they sometimes don't have the right price listed on your main page. While the service is fine if you just want to invest monthly in a certain stock or two, it's horrible with options.

I've been looking for a new broker and right now I'm going to try OptionsXpress. It's a little more expensive per trade but it should be better for options trading. If that doesn't work out, I might look into ETrade, Scottrade, or Zecco (which has the cheapest trades but the website doesn't seem like it loads properly which makes me nervous about their site security).