As stated by the previous 2 posters, if you are a regular customer with a good amount of money who trades frequently they will either wave the .5% fee or give you a flat $9 fee. For me, as a college student who has limited amounts of money to invest, I don't have to worry about the .5% right now because it isn't much more than the $7 commission and when dealing with pennies I usually don't go all in on a single stock so commission is pretty low, but if you have larger amounts of money a simple phone call and they can waive it for you or set a flat $9 fee for pennies.