CenterPoint Securities Review

Why short sellers look at CenterPoint

Short selling is where CenterPoint differs most from mainstream retail brokers. Easy-to-borrow securities can generally be shorted without paying for a locate. Hard-to-borrow stocks are different. You need to secure the shares before opening the position.

CenterPoint puts that process inside its trading software. You do not need to contact a borrow desk manually. The Short Locate Tool is available from 4:00am to 8:00pm Eastern. Enter the ticker and share quantity, request a price, and the platform returns the available inventory and locate cost.

You can then decide whether the locate makes economic sense before accepting it. That matters when trading volatile small-cap stocks, where the borrow cost can determine whether a trade is viable.

ATLAS locates and short inventory

CenterPoint clients have access to the proprietary ATLAS locate route, which is designed for short-selling strategies. ATLAS, ATLAS1, ATLAS2 and ATLAS3 are intended for day-trading locates. Standard CPST routes can be used for day trades or positions that remain open longer.

Pro-tier CenterPoint Edge clients may also receive access to an additional locate route with more short inventory and no share limits, subject to the programme requirements.

The appeal comes from the combination of:

• An in-house securities lending operation
• Roughly 6,000+ easy-to-borrow symbols
• Multiple locate sources
• Live pricing and availability inside the platform
• ATLAS locate routes
• Additional inventory for higher-tier traders
• Access to locates from premarket through after-hours

For a trader who repeatedly shorts low-float momentum stocks, those features can affect whether a trade is available at all.

Locates are generally valid for that trading day and expire at 8:00pm Eastern. If you accept a locate and cover the position intraday, the allocated shares can be reused for day trading without requesting another locate for those shares. Positions held overnight can also incur short interest based on the borrow rate.

These are two separate costs:

CenterPoint Edge is a bigger benefit than it looks

CenterPoint Edge costs $0 and provides clients with trading tools and account benefits based on account equity and trading activity. Available software includes:

• Trade Ideas for real-time scanners, alerts and backtesting
• Dilution Tracker for offerings, ATMs, warrants, convertibles and small-cap dilution data
• Benzinga Pro for real-time news, news squawk and market scanners
• Tradervue for trading journal and performance analysis
• TraderSync for trade journaling and pattern analysis
• TrendSpider for technical analysis, scanning and alerts

Those are not token freebies. Short-biased small-cap traders can realistically use several of them every trading day.

If you would never buy Trade Ideas or Benzinga Pro yourself, their retail value is irrelevant. If those subscriptions are already part of your trading stack, free access is effectively a rebate on the cost of using the broker.

Edge has Base, Active and Pro tiers, and eligibility can come from either account equity or trading volume:

Eligibility is calculated on a three-month trailing average. New clients start on the Active tier or higher for their first three months, depending on account equity, before moving to the highest tier their activity or balance supports.

The CenterPoint Pro platform

CenterPoint Pro is designed for active trading rather than casual portfolio management. It includes:

CenterPoint also offers a mobile application for monitoring positions and managing orders. CenterPoint Pro is Windows-based. Mac users need a compatibility solution such as Parallels, while CenterPoint Web runs in a browser.

CenterPoint Pro normally costs $120 a month. New accounts receive three free months of platform access. Market-data fees are separate. After the introductory period, the platform fee is waived for clients trading at least 250,000 shares a month or 1,000 options contracts a month. CenterPoint Web costs $20 a month and can be waived at lower activity thresholds.

For an active trader, the platform fee may be less important than the total cost of commissions, routing, market data, locates and borrow charges.

CenterPoint commissions and routing costs

CenterPoint does not use a zero-commission model. Equity pricing falls as monthly share volume rises:

Options start at $0.50 per contract and fall to as little as $0.20 at very high volume. Routing and regulatory fees are extra.

CenterPoint offers more than 40 routing options, including ECNs, smart routes, dark pools and market-maker routes. Some routes charge for liquidity, while others can generate rebates. Comparing CenterPoint with a commission-free broker on headline commission alone leaves out the costs that matter to active traders. Execution quality, routing control, rebates, short inventory, locate pricing, platform reliability and trading tools all affect the final result.

You should also budget for:

Market data can become a substantial cost for professional subscribers because exchange fees are higher than non-professional rates. CenterPoint is not a brokerage to open and leave dormant for six months.

Who CenterPoint makes sense for

Margin accounts can provide 4:1 intraday leverage and 2:1 overnight leverage, subject to security-specific and house requirements. The platform includes risk controls such as maximum loss per trade, maximum daily loss and loss warnings.

That is particularly relevant to short sellers, because loss potential on a short position is theoretically unlimited. A stock bought at $5 can only fall by $5. A stock shorted at $5 has no equivalent ceiling on how far it can rise.

Is CenterPoint Securities safe?

CenterPoint Securities is a division of Clear Street LLC, a member of FINRA and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. SIPC protection applies to eligible customer securities and cash if a member brokerage fails and assets are missing, subject to applicable limits.

It does not protect against trading losses. That distinction is especially important here, because leveraged day trading and short selling can produce rapid losses, and short positions can theoretically lose more than the original capital committed.

CenterPoint makes the most sense when short selling is an important part of your strategy. The key advantage is not simply a fast platform. It is access to hard-to-borrow inventory, an integrated locate system, ATLAS routes and infrastructure built for traders who regularly need shares to short.

The costs are higher and more complicated than at a mainstream commission-free broker, but that is the wrong comparison for the target customer. If you rarely trade and never short hard-to-borrow stocks, there is little reason to pay for this infrastructure.

If your P&L depends on getting the locate when a low-float stock starts squeezing at 9:34am, the locate desk, routing control and free trading-tool stack are exactly what make CenterPoint worth paying for.